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Cookies, Cakes, and Doughnuts: Bake
Bake in buttered pans.
One, Two, Three, Four Cookies. 1 cupful butter, 2 cupfuls sugar, 3 cupfuls flour, 4 eggs, 1½ teaspoonfuls Calumet baking powder, teaspoonful salt, 2 tablespoonfuls caraway seed.
Cream the butter and add half the sugar. Beat the yolks, add the remaining half of the sugar, and beat with the butter, then add the beaten whites. Mix the soda, cream of tartar, spice, and salt with the flour, and stir into the butter mixture. Take a teaspoonful dough, make into a ball with floured hands, place the balls in a pan, press or flatten into a round cake, and bake ten minutes.
Cream Cakes. 1 cupful hot water, teaspoonful salt, cupful butter, 1½ cupfuls flour, 5 eggs, yolks and whites beaten separately.
Boil the water, salt, and butter.
When boiling, add the flour, and stir well five minutes; when cool, add the eggs. This is such a stiff mixture, many find it easier to mix with the hand, and some prefer to add the eggs whole, 1 at a time. When well mixed, drop from a tablespoonful on a buttered baking pan, some distance apart. Bake twenty to thirty minutes, or till brown and well puffed. Split when cool, and fill with cream.
Éclairs. Bake the cream-cake mixture in pieces four inches long and one and a half wide. When cool, split and fill with cream. Ice with chocolate or vanilla frosting.
Cream for Cream Cakes and Éclairs. 1 pint boiled milk, 2 tablespoonfuls cornstarch, 3 eggs well beaten, cupful sugar, 1 saltspoonful salt or 1 teaspoonful butter.
Wet the cornstarch in cold mill, and cook in the boiling milk ten min- COOKIES, CAKES, AND DOUGHNUTS utes. Beat the eggs, and add the sugar and the thickened milk. Cook in a double boiler five minutes. Add the salt or butter, and when cool, fla- 707 with lemon, vanilla, or almond.
Chocolate Fingers. 3 eggs, 1 cupful sugar, + cupful boiling water, 1 cupful flour. (For Icing.) 3 cupfuls granulated sugar, 1 cupful water, 3 ounces Runkel's Chocolate, teaspoonful McIlhenny's Mexican Vanilla.
Beat the yolks of eggs and sugar until light, add in succession the flour, water, and whites beaten until stiff. Bake in moderate oven, in an oblong sheet, about half an inch thick; cut, when done, into strips about three and a half inches wide.
To make the icing, boil the sugar and water until it spins a thread, then pour in a thin stream over the chocolate, which should be melted by standing over hot water; mix well and flavor with vanilla. Let the mixture cool slightly, beat with a wooden spoon until it grains, then stand in a pan of boiling water and stir constantly until it melts. Keep in hot water while coating the cakes. Dip each cake in the melted mixture, then in a saucer containing granulated sugar. Place, without touching each other, on a clean plate. If the chocolate mixture gets too thick, add from time to time a few drops hot water, keeping it melted during the process.
Four linked recipes: a ratio cookie, cream-puff paste with its pastry-cream filling, and a sponge finger with poured chocolate icing. The measurements are the weak point, and the paste has a technique the text glosses over.
- Missing fractionsSeveral quantities have lost their fractions in the original printing: the butter and salt in the cream cakes, the water in the chocolate fingers, and the sugar in the cream filling. Standard cream-puff paste is 1 cup water, 1/2 cup butter, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 1 cup flour to 4 eggs, so the flour here is generous; the filling probably wants about 1/2 cup sugar and 1/4 teaspoon salt.
- Cookie leavening contradictionThe ingredient list calls for baking powder, but the method tells you to mix in soda, cream of tartar and spice. Baking powder combines an alkali (soda) with an acid such as cream of tartar; use the 1 1/2 teaspoons of baking powder and ignore the rest of that sentence. There is no spice in the list apart from the caraway.
- Oven temperaturesNo numbers are given for the cookies. Bake them at 375F for the stated ten minutes. "Moderate oven" for the chocolate finger sheet is usually taken as about 350-375F. Cream cakes need a hot start, 425F for the first fifteen minutes, then down to 350F to dry out; the twenty to thirty minutes given is right for the total.
- The hinge on cream cakesThey must be fully dry and hollow before they leave the oven. A puff pulled while the interior is still wet collapses as it cools and cannot be split. Judge by weight and colour, not the clock, and do not open the door in the first fifteen minutes.
- Brand namesCalumet was a baking powder; any double-acting powder works. Runkel's was a period chocolate brand; for this icing use 3 oz of unsweetened baking chocolate, not chips. McIlhenny's Mexican Vanilla was a flavouring extract.
- Old measuresA saltspoonful is a scant 1/4 teaspoon. "Boils until it spins a thread" is the thread stage, 230-234F on a candy thermometer.
- Cooking the fillingSlake the cornstarch in cold milk, not "cold mill." Ten minutes of boiling before the eggs go in is fine for cornstarch, but the five minutes in the double boiler afterwards should be watched: pull it as soon as it thickens and coats a spoon, or the eggs curdle.
- Chocolate finger dimensionsStrips three and a half inches wide would not be fingers. Cut the sheet into bars roughly three and a half inches long and an inch wide.
- YieldsApproximate only. The cookie dough, shaped a teaspoon at a time, gives a large batch, well over four dozen. The paste should give somewhere around 18 cream cakes or a dozen eclairs, and the pint of filling is enough for either.
The name of the first recipe is a mnemonic, not a description: one butter, two sugar, three flour, four eggs, the same ratio that gives 1-2-3-4 cake and one of the ways cooks carried proportions in their heads before every kitchen had reliable measuring cups. The caraway seed marks the cookie as older still, a survival of the English seed cake, where caraway is often said to have been the usual sweet-baking spice before vanilla and cinnamon became the American default. The rest of the group is pate a choux, worked here without its French name: Household Discoveries was a compendium aimed at general readers rather than trained cooks, so cream cakes and eclairs are presented as two shapes of one batter. The named brands are a period fingerprint. Turn-of-the-century American household books routinely specified proprietary baking powders, chocolates and extracts, in part because a named brand was the only guarantee of consistent strength a reader could rely on.