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Carnival Cookies
12 t soda in 1/2 C hot water 1 t baking powder in 1 C flour Vanilla to flavor Add enough flour to make a dough to roll thin. Bake in quick oven.
A rolled cookie of the plainest church-supper type: leavened twice, flavored only with vanilla, rolled thin and baked fast. The instructions assume a cook who already knows the proportions of a basic sugar-cookie dough.
- Quick ovenPeriod usage puts a "quick oven" at roughly 400-450F. At that heat a thin rolled cookie bakes very fast and the margin between pale and scorched is small, so bake one test sheet before committing the batch.
- Soda dissolved in hot waterDissolving soda in liquid before mixing was a common method when soda came coarse and lumpy and could otherwise leave bitter brown flecks. Modern baking soda is fine enough to sift with the flour, though the hot-water method still works.
- Two leavenersThe recipe names no acid ingredient, so the soda may have been intended for a dough containing something sour (buttermilk, sour milk or molasses) in the unwritten portion. Soda with nothing acidic to react with can leave a soapy taste.
- "Add enough flour to roll thin"Judge by feel: the dough should be firm enough to lift off the board without stretching. Chilling it an hour before rolling does more for handling than extra flour, which toughens the cookie.
- Roll thinThe recipe gives no thickness; "thin" for a rolled cookie of this type generally meant something on the order of an eighth of an inch, producing a crisp rather than a soft, thick cookie.
Community cookbooks like this one were compiled from cards passed between women who all baked the same handful of doughs, so the recipes record only what distinguished one version from another -- a flavoring, a leavening trick, a rolling thickness -- and leave the common ground unwritten. "Carnival" cookie names in American church and lodge books of this era are often said to point to a bazaar or fair rather than to Lent, though the derivation is traditional rather than established. Rolled cookies were in any case well suited to a community book: cheap, cut to a uniform size, and quick in a hot oven.