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Peanut Cookies
2 tablespoons butter 1/4 cup sugar 1 egg 1 teaspoon baking powder 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup flour 2 teaspoons milk 1/2 cup finely chopped peanuts 1/2 teaspoon lemon juice Cream the butter, add sugar, and egg well beaten. Mix and sift baking powder, salt, and flour; add to first mixture; then add milk, peanuts, and lemon juice. Drop from a teaspoon on a buttered sheet one inch apart, and place one-half peanut on top of each. Bake twelve to fifteen minutes in a slow oven. This recipe will make twenty-four cookies. One pint peanuts when shelled should yield one-half cup.
A small-batch drop cookie, closer to a thin peanut wafer than the chewy cookies most people expect. The dough is stiff and the quantities are tiny, so measure carefully.
- Slow ovenA slow oven here means about 300-325F. At that temperature 12-15 minutes gives a pale, crisp cookie; hotter and the sugar edges scorch before the centre sets.
- SpacingOne inch apart may be tight if your dough is slack; these can spread a little as the butter melts, so leave extra room on the sheet if the first few run together.
- The peanutsUse roasted unsalted peanuts, chopped fine but not to a paste. If all you have is salted, cut the added salt to a pinch.
- The shelling noteThe stated yield of half a cup from a pint in the shell may be on the low side, but in-shell volume yields vary a good deal with the size of the nuts. Measure the chopped nuts rather than trusting the shell volume.
- Milk and lemon juiceTwo teaspoons of milk and half a teaspoon of lemon juice are not errors. The milk just loosens a very dry dough, and the lemon lifts the flatness of the peanut; add both only after the flour is in, as directed.
- Buttered sheetParchment on the sheet is simpler and stops the thin edges welding to the pan. If you butter instead, do it lightly, as excess fat encourages spreading.
- Whole peanut on topHalf peanut on top -- Press the half peanut in gently before baking, not after; it will not stick to a set surface.
- Yield and keepingTwenty-four small cookies, as stated. Cool them fully on a rack and store airtight, or they soften within a day.
Peanut cookies of this kind turn up repeatedly in American cookbooks of the 1900s and 1910s, when the peanut was being promoted as a cheap domestic source of protein and fat. Household-science writers of the period, working from the new calorie-and-protein tables, treated nuts as a partial stand-in for meat, and peanuts were among the cheapest. Peanut butter and peanut loaf are fixtures of the same books. The note on what a pint of unshelled peanuts yields suggests that nuts were often bought in the shell, where the usable quantity is not obvious from the volume.