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Sugar Cookies (T soda t baking powder eggs)
1 t soda 2 t baking powder 2 eggs Flour to roll Cream sugar and shortening. Add eggs, soda dissolved in sour milk, nutmeg, baking powder and flour. Roll, sprinkle with sugar, cut out and bake in moderately hot oven.
The ingredient list as printed is incomplete — sugar, shortening, sour milk and nutmeg all appear in the method but never got quantities in the book. Treat this as a skeleton of a standard rolled sugar cookie rather than a working formula.
- The missing amountsWith 2 eggs, 1 teaspoon soda and 2 teaspoons baking powder, the proportions point to a fairly large batch; something on the order of 1 to 1 1/2 cups sugar, 1/2 to 3/4 cup shortening and a cup of sour milk would suit, though that is guesswork rather than anything the book states. The flour is left entirely to the cook's judgement.
- Sour milkNot spoiled milk but naturally clabbered raw milk, mildly acidic. Cultured buttermilk is the closest modern stand-in; a cup of milk with a tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice stirred in and left ten minutes also works. The acid is what the soda is there to react with.
- Why both soda and baking powderThe soda reacts with the acid in the sour milk, which gives gas as well as browning and a softer spread; the baking powder carries its own acid and tops up the leavening beyond what the milk alone can drive. Dropping either one changes the texture.
- ShorteningIn a book of this period the word commonly covered lard, or lard and butter mixed. Butter gives more flavour, vegetable shortening gives a paler, softer cookie that holds its cut shape better.
- "Moderately hot oven"Somewhere around 375-400F. Rolled cookies at that heat take roughly 8 to 10 minutes and are best pulled while the centres still look underdone, with only the edges coloured.
- Sprinkle before cuttingThe order as printed puts the sugar onto the rolled sheet before the cutter goes through it, so the sugar is pressed into the surface rather than sitting loose on top.
- Rolling a soft doughA sour-milk dough is slack. Chill it an hour before rolling, work with a floured cloth and a floured pin, and handle a third of the dough at a time so the rest stays cold.
Sugar cookies leavened with saleratus or soda and sour milk are a very common sort of entry in American community cookbooks, and church-society collections from the Midwest carry many variants of them. The sour-milk-and-soda pairing belongs to a household that had clabbered milk on hand as a matter of course and no reason to waste it; commercial baking powder, which reached American kitchens in the second half of the nineteenth century, was often added on top of the older chemistry rather than replacing it, which is why recipes of this vintage frequently call for both. The compression here -- a method paragraph running straight on from a fragment of an ingredient list -- is typical of the genre as well.