Sugar Cakes
Mix four cupfuls of sugar with eight cupfuls of flour and one large spoonful of coriander-seed; add one cupful of butter, one cupful of lard, six eggs, two tablespoonfuls of sour cream or milk, one teaspoonful of soda.--Mrs. Dr. S.
A plain rolled sugar cookie of the old Virginia sort, given as a list of ingredients with no method, no oven and no yield. The proportions are sound; everything else has to be supplied.
- The dough is a rolled oneFour cups of sugar to eight cups of flour, with six eggs and only two tablespoons of added liquid, gives a stiff, short dough rather than a batter. Cream the fats with the sugar, beat in the eggs, then work in the flour, coriander and soda sifted together, adding the cream last. Chill it, roll it about a quarter inch thick, cut, and bake.
- OvenNo temperature or time is given at all; the reader was expected to judge her own range. Bake at 350F for 8-12 minutes, until the edges are just colored; these are best pale and crisp rather than browned.
- Coriander seed"one large spoonful" probably means something close to a tablespoon. Use whole seed lightly crushed in a mortar, or coarsely ground; pre-ground coriander is much milder and you may want a little more of it.
- Soda and sour creamThe soda is partly neutralized by the acid in genuine soured cream or clabbered milk, though two tablespoons is very little acid for a whole teaspoon of soda; the recipe itself allows sweet milk instead. Cultured buttermilk or commercial sour cream works.
- LardThe cup of lard gives a short, sandy crumb. Leaf lard or a good rendered lard is closest to the original; all butter makes a denser, chewier cookie that spreads more.
- ScaleEight cups of flour is a very large batch, in the region of eight to ten dozen cookies depending on the cutter. Halving or quartering it is reasonable, and the dough keeps several days wrapped in the refrigerator.
Sugar cakes of this kind — flour, sugar, butter and eggs rolled thin and cut — were the everyday sweet baking of American households long before the word "cookie" displaced them, and "cake" here means the small flat article, not a layered one. The coriander is the telling detail: seed spices such as coriander and caraway are often said to have been a characteristic flavoring of English and colonial sugar cakes and seed cakes, and they seem to have persisted in Southern kitchens after vanilla extract had become cheap and common elsewhere. The recipe's form is typical of Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), which Marion Cabell Tyree assembled from contributions by, in the words of its own subtitle, some two hundred and fifty ladies of Virginia and her sister states: a bare list of proportions signed with an initial, written for a cook who already knew that soda wants sour cream, that the dough must be rolled, and how hot her own oven ran.