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Maple Sugar Cookies
One cup of sugar, one cup of crushed maple sugar, one cup of butter, two well beaten eggs, two tablespoons of water, two teaspoons of baking powder, and flour enough to roll out. Do not make too stiff. Bake in a quick oven.
A rolled sugar cookie in which half the sweetening is maple, which means the dough browns fast and burns faster. The vague flour instruction is the part that needs judgment.
- "Flour enough to roll out"Expect roughly 3 1/2 to 4 cups of all-purpose flour with this much butter and sugar. Add it in stages and stop as soon as the dough holds together and pulls cleanly from the bowl; the warning not to make it too stiff is the whole difference between tender and hard.
- Chill before rollingThe recipe gives no chilling step, but this dough is soft. Wrap it and refrigerate an hour, then roll about 1/4 inch thick on a lightly floured board. Warm maple dough sticks and tears.
- Crushed maple sugarThis means hard cake or block maple sugar broken up and pounded fine, not maple syrup. Granulated maple sugar sold today works directly; if you only have a block, grate it or pulse it in a food processor until it is the texture of coarse sand, since lumps will not dissolve during creaming.
- ButterOne cup is 2 sticks, 8 oz. The recipe calls for no salt; if using unsalted butter, add about 1/4 teaspoon. Butter of the period was often salted, which may be why none is listed.
- "A quick oven"Roughly 400 to 450F, depending on which period source you follow, and suited to a wood range with constant watching. For thin rolled cookies with maple sugar in them, 400F is the practical setting, 7 to 9 minutes, out when the edges have just colored.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons is modest for the amount of flour this dough will take, and the cookies will be fairly firm rather than puffed. Use a fresh tin. Period powders varied in strength between brands; if the dough tastes metallic, cut to 1 1/2 teaspoons next time.
- YieldRoughly four to six dozen 2 1/2-inch cookies, depending on how much flour the dough takes and how thin you roll. They keep well in a tin for a week.
Maple sugar, not syrup, was the household form of maple sweetening for most of the nineteenth century: the sap was boiled down past the syrup stage and cast into cakes or tubs, which stored and shipped far better than a liquid and could be scraped or pounded as needed. In New England, New York and eastern Canada it was at times cheaper than imported cane sugar, and a recipe like this one, which splits the sweetening evenly between the two, uses maple alongside the cane sugar that does the reliable creaming. The terse instruction "flour enough to roll out" is characteristic of the whole genre: it assumes a cook who has made rolled cookies before and can judge a dough by feel.