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Butterscotch Cookies
1 C butter. 3 C brown sugar. 6 C flour. 4 eggs. Mary McCormick. 1 t baking soda 1 t cream of tartar ¼ t salt Mix ingredients together and shape into a roll. Leave standing over night in a cool place and then slice off into thin slices with a sharp knife. Bake in a hot oven.
An icebox cookie of the old type: a stiff dough rolled into a log, chilled overnight, then sliced paper-thin and baked fast. The list as printed is incomplete, so treat the quantities below as a guide to what survives rather than a full formula.
- The hinge: chill hard, slice thinThe dough must be genuinely firm before slicing, or the log squashes and the rounds tear. A sharp thin-bladed knife, wiped between cuts, gives the 1/8-inch slices these cookies depend on for their snap.
- "A hot oven"In period usage this is usually taken as somewhere around 400-450F. Slices this thin will likely bake in under ten minutes and go from pale to burnt quickly, so watch the second tray.
- Missing flour and fatNo flour and no butter or shortening appear in the printed list, and both are essential to a sliceable dough. A sugar-and-egg quantity like this would normally be carried by something in the region of three cups of flour and a cup of butter, but the original amounts here cannot be recovered.
- "14 t salt"Read this as 1/4 teaspoon. Salt is then listed a second time further down, which appears to be duplication rather than a second addition.
- Soda and cream of tartarThis pairing is the old homemade baking powder, though the usual proportion is about twice as much cream of tartar as soda, so as printed the soda is in excess. If substituting modern baking powder, omit the cream of tartar.
- Why brown sugarThe butterscotch flavour comes entirely from the cup of brown sugar, not from any added candy or syrup. Dark brown sugar gives a more pronounced molasses note; pack it firmly when measuring.
- YieldWith the flour and fat missing, no reliable count is possible; a dough on two cups of sugar and two eggs would yield several dozen thin cookies. Two logs are easier to handle than one.
- StorageThe unbaked log keeps several days wrapped in the refrigerator and freezes well, which is the real advantage of the method: bake as many slices as you need.
Butterscotch icebox cookies belong to a family of "refrigerator cookies" that spread through American community cookbooks in the 1920s and 1930s, as iceboxes and, later, mechanical refrigerators became more common in home kitchens. The appeal was practical for a busy household: one mixing session produced a log that could be kept cold and sliced for fresh cookies over several days, without rolling and cutting each batch. The name simply signals brown sugar, which by the late nineteenth century had come to stand for the butterscotch flavour in cakes, pies, and cookies alike. Its appearance here under a contributor's name is typical of a congregational cookbook, where recipes were generally gathered from members and printed much as they were handed in, abbreviations and all.