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Mock Maple Cookies
1 t soda Linna Corlett. 1½ C brown sugar 1/2 C butter 1 egg 1/2 C hot water 2½ C flour 2 t cream tartar Walnut meats-vanilla Mrs. R. F. Wright.
Drop on greased tins. Makes about 4 dozen.
A community-cookbook drop cookie, printed with two contributors' names dropped into the middle of the ingredient list and no oven instruction at all. Everything you need is here, but the method has to be reconstructed.
- Reading the garbled listThe names Linna Corlett and Mrs. R. F. Wright are typesetting collisions, not ingredients. The recipe is: 1 teaspoon soda, 1½ cups brown sugar, ½ cup butter, 1 egg, ½ cup hot water, 2½ cups flour, 2 teaspoons cream of tartar, walnut meats and vanilla.
- Soda and cream of tartarTwo parts cream of tartar to one part soda is the ratio behind homemade single-acting baking powder, mixed fresh in the bowl. The recipe gives no method, but conventionally the soda is dissolved in the hot water and the cream of tartar sifted with the flour; once the two meet the batter begins working, so it is better not left standing.
- No oven temperature givenThe recipe supplies none. Drop cookies of this composition are usually baked at around 375F for 8 to 10 minutes, until the edges are set and the centres still look soft. They firm as they cool.
- Hot water in a cookie doughThe half cup of hot water makes a soft, slack batter that is likely to spread. Space the mounds well apart.
- Unmeasured walnuts and vanillaThe original gives no quantity. About ¾ cup of chopped walnut meats and a teaspoon of vanilla suit this volume of batter; the walnuts are doing most of the flavour work.
- ButterPeriod farm butter varied in both salt content and moisture. The recipe calls for no salt at all; if using unsalted butter, a scant 1/4 teaspoon may be wanted.
- YieldFour dozen, as stated, if dropped by rounded teaspoon. A tablespoon scoop will cut the count well below half and needs a minute or two longer.
"Mock" recipes fill nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cookbooks wherever an ingredient was expensive, seasonal or regional: mock turtle soup, mock apple pie, mock duck. Maple sugar and syrup were a Northeastern product with a short spring season and a price to match, and the flavour was widely imitated with dark brown sugar, which shares some of the same caramelised, molasses-adjacent notes, plus walnuts to complete the familiar maple-walnut pairing. The recipe's use of soda and cream of tartar measured separately rather than a tin of baking powder is a good period marker; commercial baking powder was long established by 1900, though the two-jar method persisted in recipes of the kind handed down rather than bought. That it carries two women's names is typical of a compiled community cook book, where recipes were collected from contributors and credited by name, sometimes with the credits landing in the wrong line of type.