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Sour Cream Cookies
Two cups of sugar One cup of sour cream One cup of butter or other shortening Two eggs Flour to stiffen One teaspoon of Larkin Soda One-half teaspoon of Larkin Table Salt One-half cup caraway seed if liked; if not, One-half teaspoon of Larkin Vanilla Flavoring Extract Roll very thin.
Four eggs One cup of butter
A plain rolled sour-cream cookie of the kind that turned up in every early-twentieth-century household book. The original gives no flour quantity, no oven heat and no baking time, so the working details below are the whole job.
- The stray last line"Four eggs One cup of butter" at the end belongs to no part of this recipe; it is almost certainly the opening of the next entry, carried over in typesetting. Ignore it and use the two eggs and one cup of butter listed above.
- Larkin Soda is baking sodaLarkin Table Salt is table salt and Larkin Vanilla Flavoring Extract is vanilla extract. The brand names are here because this book was published to sell Larkin products; any equivalent works, measure for measure.
- Sour cream then and nowThe original meant cream that had soured naturally and was distinctly acidic, thick and full-fat. Commercial cultured sour cream is a fair substitute; crème fraîche is closer in fat. Do not use light or fat-free versions, which will slacken the dough.
- "Flour to stiffen"Expect about 4 1/2 to 5 cups of all-purpose flour, added until the dough is firm enough to roll without sticking. Add the last cup gradually; the acidity and fat of the cream vary and overshooting makes the cookies tough.
- Chill before rollingWith a cup of butter and two cups of sugar, this dough is soft at room temperature. Two hours in the refrigerator makes "roll very thin" possible; work with one portion at a time and keep the rest cold.
- Oven heatNo temperature or baking time is given, and the recipe names no oven term to interpret. Around 375F suits cookies rolled this thin; they need only 6 to 9 minutes and go from pale to overbrowned quickly.
- Caraway or vanilla, not bothThe recipe offers them as alternatives, and they are genuinely different cookies: a caraway seed cake in the older English style, or a plain sweet vanilla wafer. Half a cup of caraway is assertive by modern taste; a quarter cup is closer to what most palates now expect.
- YieldRolled thin and cut at about 2 1/2 inches, this makes a very large batch -- six dozen at the least and quite possibly more. Halve it unless you want a full tin.
Good Things to Eat belongs to a genre of cookbook that was never sold: the Larkin Company of Buffalo, New York, built its business on mail-order soap and household goods distributed through neighborhood "Larkin Clubs," and recipe booklets naming Larkin soda, salt and extracts were premiums meant to keep the pantry stocked from the same catalog. That is why the ingredient list reads like an inventory. The cookie itself is older than the brand: sour cream and soda are generally said to have been a common leavening pair in American farm kitchens before commercial baking powder became cheap, the acid in the cream doing the work that cream of tartar or a phosphate powder would later do. The caraway option is often traced to the British seed cake, a flavoring so ordinary in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that it needed no explanation, and so thoroughly out of fashion by the mid-twentieth that here it is already offered as a choice rather than assumed.