Home › Bread and Bread Making › Rich Cookies
Rich Cookies
1/2 cup butter 3/4 cup flour 1/3 cup sugar 1/2 teaspoon vanilla 1 egg well beaten Raisins, nuts, or citron Cream the butter, add sugar gradually, egg, flour, and vanilla. Drop from tip of spoon in small portions on buttered sheet two inches apart. Spread thinly with a knife first dipped in cold water. Put four Sultana raisins on each cookie, almonds blanched and cut in strips, or citron cut in small pieces.
A thin butter wafer of the Boston Cooking School type, with almost no flour relative to the fat. The original gives no oven heat or time, so those are the first things to settle.
- OvenBake at 350-375F for 7 to 10 minutes, until the edges are brown and the centres still pale. These are thin enough to go from done to burnt in under a minute, so watch the last two minutes rather than trusting a timer.
- The hinge: spread them thinThe knife dipped in cold water is what makes the cookie. The dough is soft and sticky, and a wet blade will push it into a thin round without dragging; re-dip between cookies. Skip it and you get thick, cakey mounds instead of crisp wafers.
- SpacingTwo inches is the minimum, as the original specifies. With half a cup of butter to three-quarters of a cup of flour, the batter spreads considerably as it melts.
- Sultana raisinsGolden raisins, seedless and small. Ordinary dark raisins work but will look coarse on so thin a cookie; snip them in half if they are large.
- CitronCandied citron peel, a firm translucent preserved rind common in winter baking of the period. Candied orange or lemon peel is the closest current substitute.
- Salt and leaveningThe recipe calls for neither. If your butter is unsalted, a pinch of salt with the flour improves it without changing the texture.
- PanA buttered sheet works, but butter alone on a hot pan encourages the edges to catch. Parchment gives a more even bottom and lets you lift the cookies while they are still soft.
- Yield and coolingAbout 24 to 30 small cookies. Let them firm on the sheet for a minute before moving them; straight from the oven they will tear.
Cookbooks of this generation often used "rich" to mean a high proportion of butter and eggs to flour; here half a cup of butter against three-quarters of a cup of flour is a high fat ratio, which is why the result is a thin wafer rather than a biscuit. Drop cookies studded with a few raisins, almond strips or a scrap of citron were a common tea-table item in American households around 1900, when candied citron and blanched almonds were sold for holiday baking. If the recipe sits under bread and bread making, that reflects how some books of the period grouped flour-based goods -- loaves, rolls, biscuits and small cakes -- in a single chapter rather than splitting them into desserts.