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Cream Cookies
1/3 cup butter 2 teaspoons baking powder 1 cup sugar 1 teaspoon salt 2 eggs 2 teaspoons yellow ginger 1/2 cup thin cream Flour to roll Mix and bake same as Vanilla Wafers.
A plain rolled cookie of the type that filled turn-of-the-century cookie jars: creamed butter and sugar, eggs, a little cream, and only as much flour as the dough needs to hold a rolling pin. The instruction to "bake same as Vanilla Wafers" means roll thin, cut, and bake briefly in a moderate oven.
- Flour to rollExpect roughly 2 1/2 to 3 cups of all-purpose flour, added a little at a time until the dough is just stiff enough to handle. Stop as soon as it stops sticking; extra flour is what turns these from crisp to hard.
- Chill before rollingWith butter and cream in the dough it may be soft; if so, an hour in the refrigerator makes it easier to handle, and rolling on a lightly floured board about 1/8 inch thick gives a thin, crisp cookie.
- Thin creamThis is light or single cream, about 18 to 20 percent fat, not whipping cream. Half-and-half is the closest ordinary substitute.
- Yellow gingerAlmost certainly ordinary dried ground ginger, the unbleached sort. Two teaspoons makes a strongly spiced cookie.
- The saltA full teaspoon reads high to modern palates; half a teaspoon suits most tastes today.
- Oven and timeFor thin rolled cookies, 350 to 375F for 7 to 10 minutes, until the edges are just brown, works well; they crisp as they cool, so pull them while the centres still look pale.
- YieldAbout four to five dozen cookies from a 2-inch cutter, depending on how thin you roll.
Cream cookies belong to the large family of rolled "jar cookies" that American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries printed by the dozen, each a small variation on the same butter-sugar-egg base: caraway, nutmeg, lemon, ginger. The cross-reference to Vanilla Wafers is typical of the period's economy: once a book had explained rolling, cutting, and baking once, later recipes gave only the flavouring that made them different.