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Imperial Cookies
1/2 cup butter 2 1/2 cups flour 1 cup sugar 2 teaspoons baking powder 2 eggs 1/2 teaspoon lemon extract 1 tablespoon milk 1/2 teaspoon grated nutmeg Mix and bake same as Vanilla Wafers.
A plain rolled sugar cookie flavored with lemon and nutmeg. The original leans on a companion recipe for method, so the working details are worth spelling out.
- The missing method"Mix and bake same as Vanilla Wafers" sends the cook to a companion recipe not reproduced here. On the usual rolled-cookie procedure that would mean: cream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, add the milk and extract, then work in the flour sifted with the baking powder and nutmeg, rolling and cutting the dough rather than dropping it.
- Chill before rollingHandling -- Half a cup of butter to two and a half cups of flour makes a fairly stiff dough, with two eggs and a tablespoon of milk as the only liquid. If it softens as you work it, a spell in the refrigerator and a lightly floured surface will make it easier to roll thin.
- OvenNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, roughly 350-375F, suits thin rolled cookies of this type; they take about 7 to 10 minutes and are done when the edges are just brown, the centers firming as they cool on the sheet.
- Flour measureCup measures of flour vary with how the cup is filled. Take 2 1/2 cups as roughly 10 to 11 oz, and hold back the last quarter cup until you see whether the dough will roll.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons in this quantity of flour is in line with modern double-acting powder, so no adjustment is needed. If your powder has been open a year, replace it; these cookies have no other lift.
- NutmegHalf a teaspoon grated fresh from the whole nut is assertive and correct here. Pre-ground jarred nutmeg is duller; if that is what you have, the same measure is safe but the flavor will be flatter.
- Lemon extractBottled lemon extract was a common flavoring in books of this period. The zest of half a lemon, rubbed into the sugar, gives a cleaner result if you prefer it.
- YieldNo yield is given. Rolled about an eighth of an inch thick and cut at 2 inches, the batch makes a large number of small wafers -- considerably more than four dozen -- with the exact count depending on thickness and re-rolled trimmings.
"Imperial" attached itself to a range of nineteenth-century foods -- imperial cake and imperial biscuit among them -- apparently as a name that promised richness rather than describing any fixed formula, and here it marks a slightly dressier version of the household rolled sugar cookie: butter, eggs, and two flavorings instead of one. The recipe also shows how far chemical leavening had gone in the American kitchen by the time such books were compiled; a cookie that an earlier generation might have raised with beaten eggs alone calls for two teaspoons of commercial baking powder. The shorthand instruction to mix and bake "same as Vanilla Wafers" is common in books of this kind, where a single method served a run of variations.