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Gold Cookies
Mrs. H. Good. 12 C butter 1 C sugar 4 egg yolks 1½ C flour 2 t baking powder 1 t vanilla 1/2 C ground nutmeats 2 t cinnamon Mix nuts and cinnamon and roll about teaspoon of dough and put 3 inches apart on cookie sheet and bake 15 minutes. 1 C butter 14 C milk 3½ C flour 12 t salt
A community-cookbook entry typed in shorthand and further scrambled in transcription, so read the ingredient list with care before you start. The bones of it are a rich egg-yolk butter cookie rolled in cinnamon and nuts.
- The mangled fractionsMissing slashes are the main obstacle: "12 C butter" is 1/2 cup, "14 C milk" is 1/4 cup, and "12 t salt" is 1/2 teaspoon. Read them that way and the proportions behave; read them literally and they do not.
- Two recipes in one blockThe trailing line -- 1 cup butter, 1/4 cup milk, 3 1/2 cups flour, 1/2 teaspoon salt -- has no method attached and does not belong to a dough already fully specified above. It is almost certainly the head of the next recipe on the page, and should be ignored here.
- No oven temperatureThe original gives none, as was common when contributors assumed a shared range. A butter-and-yolk drop cookie of this richness wants 350F; 15 minutes at that heat is about right for a teaspoon of dough.
- Egg yolks onlyFour yolks and no whites give the colour the name refers to and a short, sandy crumb. The whites would have had somewhere else to go in a day's baking, though this recipe does not say where.
- Ground nutmeatsPeriod shorthand for shelled nuts, here ground. The recipe does not say which nut. Grind them to a coarse meal rather than a paste, or the coating will clump instead of clinging.
- The coating stepThe nuts and cinnamon are not mixed into the dough. Roll each teaspoon of dough in the mixture, then set it on the sheet; the two teaspoons of cinnamon are a large amount for a coating and can be cut back to taste.
- SpacingThree inches apart is generous for a cookie this size, but the dough is soft and does spread. Two inches will do on a modern half-sheet pan.
- YieldExpect roughly three to four dozen from teaspoon-sized pieces. Cool them on the sheet a minute before moving, as high-butter, no-white doughs are fragile while hot.
Gold cookies and silver cookies are often said to have travelled as a pair through American church and club cookbooks: the gold made with yolks, the silver with the leftover whites, so that a dozen eggs produced two batches and nothing was wasted. The logic is the same one behind gold and silver cakes, and it belongs to a kitchen where eggs came from a yard or a neighbour rather than a carton and were used whole across a day's baking. A congregational fundraiser is exactly the kind of book where such economies would be expected to surface -- contributors seem to have submitted what they actually made, in the compressed private shorthand they used at home, which would explain why the measurements arrive without punctuation and the method assumes you already know what a moderate oven feels like.