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Chocolate Cookies
1/2 cup butter 1 cup sugar 1 egg 1/4 teaspoon salt 2 ozs. unsweetened chocolate 2 1/2 cups flour (scant) 2 teaspoons baking powder 1/4 cup milk Cream the butter, add sugar gradually, egg well beaten, salt, and chocolate melted. Beat well, and add flour mixed and sifted with baking powder alternately with milk. Chill, roll very thin, then shape with a small cutter, first dipped in flour, and bake in a moderate oven.
A plain rolled chocolate cookie of the early twentieth century, stiff enough to cut into shapes and thin enough to snap. The dough must be genuinely cold before it meets the rolling pin.
- Oven temperature"A moderate oven" corresponds to roughly 350-375F. Rolled thin, the cookies need only 7-10 minutes; pull them when the edges look set, as chocolate dough hides browning and goes bitter once scorched.
- Chill properlyThis is the hinge. The dough is soft from a full half cup of butter and will tear rather than roll unless it has had at least an hour in the refrigerator, wrapped. Work with a quarter of it at a time and return the rest to the cold.
- Unsweetened chocolateTwo ounces of baking chocolate, melted and cooled slightly before it goes in so it does not scramble the egg. Cocoa powder is not a substitute without adjusting the fat; if you must, use about 6 tablespoons cocoa plus 2 tablespoons butter.
- "2 1/2 cups flour (scant)"Around 300 g of all-purpose flour. Add the last half cup by feel, stopping when the dough just holds together in a mass; excess flour makes these dry and chalky.
- Butter and sugar1/2 cup is one stick, 113 g. Cream it soft, not melted, or the dough will spread instead of holding its cut shape.
- Rolling and cutting"Very thin" means about 1/8 inch. A small cutter dipped in flour keeps the edges clean; scraps can be re-chilled and rerolled once before they toughen.
- YieldRoughly five to six dozen small cookies, depending on the cutter. They keep well for a week in a tin and are firm enough to ice or sandwich with jam.
Rolled and cut cookies like this one belong to the era when chemical leavening had become cheap and reliable, and household books were working out what to do with it beyond biscuits and cake. Unsweetened chocolate in cake-sized blocks had been a grocery staple in America since the nineteenth century, sold for grating or melting rather than eating, so a cook reaching for two ounces of it was using a familiar pantry item rather than an indulgence. The technique here -- butter creamed with sugar, egg beaten in, dry ingredients alternated with milk, then the dough chilled before rolling -- is a standard cookie method found with small variations across many books of the period.