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Cookies, Cakes, and Doughnuts: Flour
Sour-Cream Cookies. 1 cupful sour cream, 1 teaspoonful soda, 1 cupful sugar, Dash salt, Flour, teaspoonful nutmeg inch COOKIES, CAKES, AND DOUGHNUTS Mix the ingredients with enough flour to roll. Roll thin, and bake a nice brown.
Oklahoma Rocks. 2 cupfuls brown sugar cupful butter, 3 eggs, Salt, 1 pound chopped nuts, 1 pound raisins, 1 teaspoonful soda in cupful boiling water, 1 teaspoonful cinnamon, teaspoonful cloves, Flour to make stiff.
Mix the ingredients as given, and drop in spoonfuls on a greased baking pan.
Egg Cookies. 1 cupful sour cream, 1 cupful sugar, 1 teaspoonful soda, Dash salt, 1 teaspoonful McIlhenny's Mexican Vanilla, Flour enough to make soft dough.
Mix the cream, sugar, and soda with flour, a dash salt and a little vanilla, then flour enough to roll thin easily without sticking.
Boston Cookies. 1 cupful butter, 1½ cupfuls sugar, 3 eggs, 1 teaspoonful, soda, 1½ teaspoonfuls hot water. 3 1/4 cupfuls flour, teaspoonful salt, 1 teaspoonful cinnamon, 1 cupful chopped walnuts, cupful currants, cupful seeded chopped raisins.
Four drop-and-roll cookie doughs from the era when a cook was trusted to judge "flour enough." They are workable, but several quantities need translating and one whole method is missing.
- Missing fractionsSeveral amounts have lost their fractions in this printing: the butter in Oklahoma Rocks, the boiling water for the soda, the cloves, the currants and raisins in Boston Cookies, and the flour figure printed as "31 cupfuls." For Boston Cookies that is almost certainly 3½ cupfuls; for the fruit, ½ cupful of each is a reasonable guess, but the printing gives no way to be sure.
- Sour cream then and nowThe sour cream called for is naturally soured raw cream, thicker and more acidic than the cultured sour cream sold today. Full-fat cultured sour cream is the nearest substitute; the acid is what activates the soda, so do not swap in sweet cream without adding an acid.
- Soda without baking powderThese doughs rely entirely on soda reacting with sour cream or, in the Rocks, with the moisture and brown sugar. Mix and get them into the oven promptly, since the lift begins as soon as the liquid meets the soda.
- "Flour enough to roll"For the sour-cream and egg cookies, add flour until the dough just stops sticking to a floured board, roughly 2½ to 3 cupfuls per cupful of cream. Any more and the cookies bake hard rather than tender.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given; the recipes go by colour rather than degrees. In a modern oven, rolled cookies of this type will take roughly 375F for 8 to 10 minutes, until the edges reach the "nice brown" the recipe asks for; the dropped Rocks, around 350F for about 12 minutes.
- McIlhenny's Mexican VanillaA branded extract of the period. Any good vanilla extract stands in at the same measure.
- Boston CookiesThe method has dropped out of the text entirely. Handle it as a standard drop cookie: cream butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, dissolve the soda in the hot water and add it, then the dry ingredients, then the nuts and fruit.
- YieldThe rolled cookies make roughly three to four dozen depending on thickness; Oklahoma Rocks, with a pound each of nuts and raisins, makes a great deal more.
The sour-cream cookie is a farm-kitchen recipe in the plainest sense: it exists because a household that kept a cow had cream going sour on the shelf and needed to use it, and because soda answered that acid with a lift no other leavener of the period could match so cheaply. Rocks — spiced, fruit-and-nut-heavy drop cookies whose name is often said to come from their craggy shape rather than their texture — turn up under a variety of regional names in American community and household books, with the state or town attached almost at random. A branded vanilla in the egg cookies suggests something about the collection's period: bottled extracts eventually became cheap and advertised heavily enough that a recipe writer might name the maker as a matter of course.