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Cookies, Cakes, and Doughnuts: Calumet
Chocolate Cookies. 1 cupful butter, 1 cupful brown sugar, 2 eggs, 1 teaspoonful cinnamon, teaspoonful cloves, MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK 1 cupful almonds cut fine, without blanching, 1 cupful currants cleaned and dried), 2 ounces Runkel's Chocolate, ½ cupful milk, 2 teaspoonfuls Calumet baking powder, Flour.
Mix butter, sugar, eggs, cinnamon, cloves, almonds, currants, the chocolate dissolved in cupful milk, and flour enough to roll; before adding the flour, put in baking powder. Mix in the order given; roll out about an eighth of an inch thick; shape with cake cutter, and bake in a moderate oven. Make a thick sirup of cupful each granulated sugar and water boiled together, and brush the cakes with this sirup as soon as they are taken from the oven.
Springerlein (German recipe). 1 cupful powdered sugar, 4 eggs, Grated rind 1 lemon, 4 cupfuls flour, teaspoonful Calumet baking powder.
Beat the eggs thoroughly with the sugar, add the rind of lemon, flour, and baking powder sifted with the flour, and mix quickly into loaf shape without much handling. Set in a cool place two hours. Flour a baking board, roll out dough to quarter of an inch thick, dust the mold with flour, press the springerlein on it tightly but firmly, then turn it over and carefully remove the cakes. Cut off surplus dough, put in the remainder, and mold more. Use as little flour as possible in rolling out. Put a cloth on the table, sprinkle it with aniseed, lay the cakes on it, and stand twelve hours in a cool room.
Two rolled cookies from an advertising cookbook: a spiced chocolate-almond wafer finished with sugar syrup, and a molded German anise cookie. Both are stiff doughs meant to be rolled thin and cut, not dropped.
- Moderate ovenBake at 350F. At an eighth of an inch thick the chocolate cookies need only 7-9 minutes; pull them while the centers still look slightly soft, since they crisp as they cool.
- The chocolateRunkel's was almost certainly an unsweetened baking chocolate. Use 2 oz unsweetened chocolate, melted into the warmed milk rather than stirred into cold milk, and let it cool to lukewarm before it meets the eggs.
- Flour enough to rollExpect roughly 3 to 3½ cups. Add it in stages until the dough just holds together, then chill it at least an hour; with a cup of butter it is unmanageable at room temperature.
- Missing fractionsSeveral quantities in the printed text have lost their fractions. The cloves are most likely ½ teaspoon, the syrup ½ cup each sugar and water, and the springerle baking powder ½ teaspoon.
- The syrup glazeBoil the sugar and water together to the thick syrup the recipe asks for, and brush it on while the cookies are still hot from the sheet. Applied cold it beads and stays sticky.
- Almonds unblanchedSkins on is deliberate here and gives flecks of brown through the dough. Chop by hand or pulse briefly; a food processor run too long turns them to paste and the dough will not roll.
- Springerle moldsA carved springerle rolling pin or board is what is meant. Flour the mold, press firmly enough to take a sharp impression, and cut the cakes apart before moving them, or the design distorts.
- Drying, then bakingThe twelve hours on the aniseed cloth is a drying stage that sets the pattern so it survives the oven. The printed recipe stops there, but the cookies still have to be baked afterward, traditionally in a slow oven, until the tops are pale and the bases just colored.
- YieldThe chocolate dough gives roughly five dozen 2-inch cookies; the springerle dough about four dozen, depending on the mold.
Calumet baking powder was a Chicago brand of the advertising-cookbook era, and the two recipes here show the pattern plainly: standard household formulas with the brand name written into the ingredient list, alongside another advertiser's product in Runkel's chocolate. The German cookie is more usually spelled Springerle, and the name is generally traced to a dialect word for a small leaping figure, after the horses and other animals carved into the traditional molds. Its method belongs to an older world of baking than the chemically leavened cookie beside it: the batter is beaten long with eggs and sugar, the pattern set by a long rest in cool air, and the flavor carried by aniseed strewn under the cakes rather than mixed into them -- though the printed recipe does itself call for baking powder, which traditional versions did without.