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Ice-Box Cookies (Lb oleo C flour sifted with C)
1 lb. oleo. 6 C flour, sifted with 2 C granulated sugar 3 eggs 1 t soda 1 C nutmeats, cu A Cream oleo, and sugar, add eggs well beaten and deur sifted with the soda. Add nutmeats, mix with fingers, roll in long rolls, stand in icebox over night, cut off the desired thickness and ban moderate oven.
The text has come through the scanner badly — "deur" is flour and "ban" is bake — but the method is a standard refrigerator cookie and reads clearly enough once those are restored. It is a very large batch.
- OleoOleomargarine, sold in one-pound blocks. One pound is four sticks, or two cups; use a firm stick margarine rather than a soft tub spread, which carries more water and will slacken the dough.
- The flour and sugarSix cups of flour to two cups of sugar is a lean, shortbread-leaning ratio typical of slice-and-bake doughs, which need to hold a clean edge. Sift the soda through with the flour as written so it disperses; there is no acid in the batter, so the soda is doing little more than encouraging browning and spread.
- No salt, no flavouringUnsalted margarine will taste flat here. If your margarine is unsalted, add about a teaspoon of salt with the flour, and a tablespoon of vanilla is in keeping with the period.
- Nutmeats"Cu" is cut, meaning chopped — walnuts or pecans are the usual choice. Chop them fine; large pieces tear the rolls when you slice them.
- Rolling and chillingShape into logs roughly two inches across, wrap in wax paper or plastic, and refrigerate overnight. A modern refrigerator runs colder than an icebox did, so the dough will be firmer than the writer expected; let the logs sit five minutes on the counter before slicing to keep them from cracking.
- Moderate oven350F. Slice about a quarter inch thick and bake 10 to 12 minutes, until the edges are just coloured; thinner slices need 8 to 9.
- YieldSix cups of flour makes eight to ten dozen cookies. The dough logs keep a week in the refrigerator and freeze well for a couple of months, which is the point of the method — bake a pan at a time.
Icebox or refrigerator cookies belong to the first decades of domestic mechanical refrigeration, and they spread quickly through community cookbooks in the 1920s and 1930s: a cook could mix one large batch, keep the logs cold, and slice off a pan whenever company came. The use of oleomargarine rather than butter is a period marker of its own; it was often the economical fat in Midwestern kitchens, and it was for decades taxed and regulated as a butter substitute, generally sold uncoloured until the laws loosened around the middle of the century. A community cookbook of this kind gathered dozens of such recipes from individual contributors, which is why the instructions are so telegraphic; they were written for cooks who already knew what a roll of icebox dough should feel like.