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Cookies, Cakes, and Doughnuts: Strips
Cinnamon Strips. 2 cupfuls brown sugar, 4 eggs, cupful shredded almonds, Grated peel 1 lemon, 1 tablespoonful cinnamon, 1 teaspoonful cloves, 4 cupfuls flour.
Cream the sugar and eggs till they are a light froth, add the shredded almonds, lemon peel, and spices, sift in the flour, mix to a stiff batter, roll out on a floured baking board, cut into long strips, and bake until brown.
Chocolate Strips. cupful butter, 1 cupful sugar, 2 eggs, MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK 1½ squares Runkel's Chocolate, 1 teaspoonful McIlhenny's Mexican Vanilla, 11 cupfuls flour.
Cream the butter, sugar, and eggs, add the chocolate and vanilla, then the flour, beat thoroughly, pour into a shallow pan in a thin layer. Bake quickly, brush with white of egg, and dust with powdered sugar; while hot, cut into narrow strips.
CAKES MADE FROM SOUR MILK Mrs. Moberly's Sour-Cream Cake. 1 cupful sugar, 2 eggs, 1 cupful sour cream, teaspoonful soda, 2 cupfuls flour, 1½ teaspoonfuls baking powder, 1 teaspoonful lemon extract.
Beat sugar, egg yolks, and cream very light; sift in flour, soda, and baking powder. Flavor, add whites of eggs beaten to a stiff froth in a loaf cake.
Three short recipes typical of early-1900s cookbook pages: no oven temperature, no times, and at least one quantity lost to bad typesetting. Read the ambiguities before you start.
- Missing amountsThe chocolate strips give the butter as "cupful" with no number, and the cinnamon strips list "cupful shredded almonds" the same way. One cup is a reasonable assumption in both cases, but the original text does not say.
- Brand-name ingredientsRunkel's was a New York chocolate manufacturer; baking chocolate of the period was commonly sold in one-ounce squares, so 1½ squares is probably about 1½ oz, melted — though whether unsweetened chocolate is meant is an assumption. McIlhenny's Mexican Vanilla was a commercial extract; any good vanilla extract stands in.
- Oven temperaturesThe book gives none. "Bake until brown" for the cinnamon strips suggests a moderate oven; on a modern dial something around 350F, baked until the surface is dry and set, is a reasonable starting point. "Bake quickly" means a hotter oven and a short bake for so thin a layer — watch it rather than trust a timer.
- Cinnamon strips have no fat and no leaveningCinnamon strips have no added fat and no leavening -- Sugar, eggs, nuts, spice and flour only; what fat there is comes from the eggs and almonds. Whatever lift the dough gets comes from beating the whole eggs and sugar to a froth, so do not shortcut that stage. The result should be crisp and dry rather than cakey.
- Rolling a stiff egg doughFour cups of flour into four eggs gives something closer to a paste than a pastry. Chill it before rolling, work with a well-floured board, and cut strips about half an inch wide; the dough spreads very little.
- Cut the chocolate sheet while hotThe instruction is not decorative. Once the egg-white glaze and sugar set, the slab shatters rather than slices. Score it within a minute or two of leaving the oven.
- Sour cream and sodaMrs. Moberly's cake relies on the acid in genuinely soured cream to react with the soda. Modern cultured sour cream works; ultra-pasteurised sweet cream does not.
- Pan and yieldPan -- "In a loaf cake" means the batter is baked as a loaf; a standard loaf tin in a moderate oven, tested with a skewer, is the modern equivalent. No yield is given for the strip recipes, and it will depend on how thinly they are rolled and how wide they are cut.
Strip cookies like these are generally traced to a German and Austrian inheritance — an egg-and-sugar dough with almonds, no butter, rolled out and cut into batons, much like the first recipe here. Their appearance in an American household book alongside brand names for chocolate and vanilla shows the moment cleanly: immigrant baking traditions being written down in cups and teaspoonfuls, with a manufacturer's name attached. The sour-cream cake belongs to a different tradition on the same page, the thrift baking of households that kept milk without refrigeration and used it once it turned, neutralising the acid with soda.