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Chocolate Cookies
Four eggs One cup of butter One cup of sugar. Three cups of flour One cup of sugar Three squares of unsweetened chocolate One-half teaspoon of Larkin Vanilla Flavoring Extract Flour sufficient to roll very thin.
This is an ingredient list rather than a working recipe: as printed it has no fat, no egg, no liquid and no leavening, and no baking instructions at all. Three cups of flour, one cup of sugar and three squares of chocolate will not come together into anything rollable, so treat the page as a record of proportions and fill in the rest from a standard rolled cookie dough.
- What is missingA rolled chocolate cookie of this era would typically need a fat (butter), egg, and a leavener such as baking powder, creamed and mixed before the flour goes in; a cup of butter, one or two eggs and a teaspoon of baking powder would be a plausible reconstruction, but none of it is on the page. Without them the list cannot be baked as written.
- Squares of chocolateAn unsweetened baking chocolate square is 1 oz, so three squares is 3 oz. Melt it gently and let it cool slightly before it meets the creamed butter and sugar, or it will melt the creamed mixture.
- Larkin Vanilla Flavoring ExtractA house brand sold by the Larkin Company, long gone. Use ordinary pure vanilla extract in the same half-teaspoon quantity; the amount is modest because the chocolate is meant to lead.
- "Flour sufficient to roll very thin"This means add flour beyond the three cups only until the dough stops sticking. Overshoot and thin cookies bake to gravel. Chill the dough an hour before rolling and it will take far less extra flour.
- Rolling and thickness"Very thin" here is probably around 1/8 inch. Roll between sheets of paper rather than on a heavily floured board, and cut with a plain round cutter.
- OvenThe original gives none. Thin rolled cookies want a moderate to fairly quick oven, 350-375F, for 7 to 10 minutes; they are done when the edges firm and before the surface looks dry, since unsweetened chocolate hides browning.
- YieldThree cups of flour makes a large batch, roughly four to five dozen two-inch cookies rolled thin.
The Larkin Company of Buffalo, New York, built a mail-order empire on soap and household goods sold with premiums, and like many such firms it circulated cookery booklets in which its own extracts, spices and baking supplies appeared by name in the ingredient lists. That commercial purpose may explain the shape of this entry: the flavoring extract is specified by brand while the butter, eggs and oven are left to the reader. Unsweetened chocolate in one-ounce squares had become a reliable pantry staple by the turn of the twentieth century, and the baking squares were what a household kept on hand.