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Cookies
1 C brown sugar 1 C white sugar ¾ C butter ¾ C lard 3 eggs 4 C flour 1 t soda 1 t salt 1 T cinnamon ¼ lb. nutmeats 2 t vanilla Mix well, and form into two rolls. Place in icebox and slice thinly when ready to bake.
Mrs. W. J. Dillon.
An icebox cookie: a stiff, buttery dough chilled into logs and sliced thin as needed. The original gives no oven temperature or baking time, so those are the two things you have to supply.
- The fractionsThe quantities printed as "34 C butter," "34 C lard" and "14 lb. nutmeats" are three-quarters of a cup each of butter and lard, and a quarter pound of nuts. A quarter pound of shelled nutmeats is roughly one cup chopped.
- OvenBake at 375F for 8 to 10 minutes, until the edges are set and lightly browned. Thin slices go from pale to burnt quickly, so watch the first tray and adjust.
- LardThe half-butter, half-lard mix gives a short, crisp cookie that slices cleanly. Modern shortening works in its place; all butter is also fine but the dough is softer and the slices spread more.
- Chilling is the methodThe dough must be genuinely cold and firm before slicing, which means several hours in the refrigerator or overnight. Wrap the logs so they do not dry out, and roll them on the counter now and then while they firm up to keep the cross-section round.
- Slice thickness"Thinly" here means about 1/8 inch. Use a thin, sharp knife and rotate the log a quarter turn every few slices so one side does not flatten.
- Soda without acidThere is no sour milk, molasses or buttermilk in the dough, though the cup of brown sugar supplies some acidity, so the teaspoon of soda has relatively little to react with and does only a modest amount of lifting. Sift it through the flour so it does not streak.
- NutsChop the nutmeats fine. Large pieces tear the slices apart at the knife. Walnuts, pecans or hickory nuts all suit the cinnamon.
- Yield and keepingTwo logs sliced thin give something in the range of six to ten dozen small cookies, depending how fat you roll the logs. The dough keeps about a week refrigerated and freezes well, which is the point of the form: you bake a tray at a time.
Icebox or refrigerator cookies belong to the era this book comes from, when a household chest cooled by a block of ice made it practical to keep raw dough cold for days and bake a few at a time rather than commit to a whole batch. Community cookbooks compiled by church societies traded such recipes, and similar doughs appear under various names across them. The nut-and-cinnamon version, sliced thin and baked crisp, is one recurring pattern; the equal measures of butter and lard reflect a kitchen where lard was cheap and readily at hand, and valued for the short texture it gives a rolled or sliced cookie.