Cookies
3 eggs. 1 cupful of butter or lard. 2 cupfuls of sugar. 6 cupfuls of sifted flour. 1 nutmeg. 1 teaspoonful of soda. 2 teaspoonfuls of cream of tartar, sifted with the flour.
Cream the butter with one cup of the sugar, beat the eggs separately and put into the yolks the remaining cup of sugar; add this to the butter, and put in whites and flour last. Roll thin and bake quickly.--Mrs. F. F. F.
A plain rolled sugar cookie of the sort meant to be made in quantity and kept in a tin. The dough carries no liquid at all, which is the thing to watch.
- The dough will feel drySix cups of flour against three eggs and a cup of fat gives a very stiff, crumbly mass with nothing but the eggs for moisture. Work it together with the hands and let it rest, chilled, for half an hour before rolling; if it still cracks apart at the edges, a tablespoon or two of milk brings it together without changing the character of the cookie.
- "Bake quickly"The recipe gives no oven term at all, only the instruction to bake fast; a hot oven, roughly 400-425F, answers to it. Rolled thin, these will likely need only about 6 to 8 minutes and can go from pale to scorched quickly, so watch the first tray and set the time from it.
- Soda and cream of tartarOne part soda to two parts cream of tartar is the standard homemade baking powder of the period, mixed from two jars rather than bought in one tin. The cream of tartar is sifted through the flour as the recipe directs, which distributes it evenly. Substituting commercial baking powder for both would take roughly 3 to 4 teaspoons, not two.
- A nutmeg means a whole oneGrated fresh, one nutmeg yields roughly 2 to 3 teaspoons of powder, which is a great deal by modern taste. Pre-ground nutmeg is much weaker in aroma; start with two teaspoons and judge.
- Butter or lardThe two are interchangeable by volume here but not in effect. Lard gives a shorter, more tender cookie with no dairy flavor; butter gives more taste and slightly more spread. A cupful of butter is 8 ounces; lard, being lighter, runs a little under that.
- Beating the eggs separatelyThe recipe has the yolks creamed in with the sugar and the whites added last, which is a common period handling and may add some lift alongside the soda. Note that it does not actually ask for the whites to be beaten stiff or folded in.
- Rolling thinAbout an eighth of an inch. Roll on a floured board a portion at a time, keeping the rest cold, and re-roll scraps only once — the flour picked up on the second pass makes them tough.
- YieldThe full batch makes something on the order of eight dozen 2½-inch cookies. Halving it is reasonable unless you are filling a tin.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, was assembled from contributions by named and initialed Virginia housewives — hence "Mrs. F. F. F." — and this cookie is a good specimen of the type: no liquid, no flavoring but nutmeg, and proportions given in round cupfuls that scale easily up or down. The word cookie itself is generally traced to the Dutch koekje, "little cake," carried into American English through New York, at a period when English cookbooks still called much the same thing a biscuit. The soda-and-cream-of-tartar pairing is of a piece with the date: chemical leavening was well established in home cake and cookie baking by this time, but commercial baking powder sold ready-mixed in one tin had not yet displaced the practice of combining the two ingredients from separate jars. Nutmeg was cheap and shelf-stable, and a whole one grated into a batch of cookies was unremarkable in recipes of this kind.