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Sugar Cookies (T salt milk level t soda Flour)
t salt milk 1 level t soda Flour Cream sugar and shortening together, add egg, well beaten, nutmeg, salt, and milk into which soda has been dissolved. Then add flour enough to roll. 1 C sugar ½ C shortening 1/2 C milk 2 eggs
The ingredient list in this church-book entry has been scrambled in setting — fragments of it appear both before and after the method — so read it as a whole before starting. Reassembled, it calls for 1 cup sugar, shortening, 1/2 cup milk, 2 eggs, salt, nutmeg, 1 level teaspoon soda, and flour enough to roll.
- The shortening figure is unreliableAs printed it reads 1 1/2 C shortening against only 1 C sugar, which would give a greasy dough that will not hold a rolled shape. Most sugar cookies of this type use equal or less fat than sugar; 1/2 cup is the likely intent, but the original is genuinely ambiguous and we will not pretend otherwise.
- Shortening means lard or a hydrogenated tub fatIn a community cookbook of this period "shortening" usually means lard, or vegetable shortening in books late enough to have it. Butter works and tastes better, but it spreads more; chill the dough if you use it.
- Soda with no acidOne level teaspoon of soda dissolved in sweet milk has little acid to work against, so it acts mainly as a browning and tenderizing agent rather than a strong lift, though some gas is released as it breaks down in the oven. If you want the cookies to rise more, use sour milk or buttermilk instead, or substitute baking powder for the soda.
- "Flour enough to roll"Expect roughly 3 to 3 1/2 cups, added a half cup at a time until the dough just stops sticking. Stopping early gives a tender cookie; every extra cup past workable makes them tough and dry.
- No oven temperature is given375F works well. Roll about 1/4 inch thick, cut, sprinkle with sugar, and bake 8 to 10 minutes until the edges are barely colored.
- NutmegGrate it fresh — about 1/2 teaspoon. Pre-ground jarred nutmeg gives a fraction of the aroma.
- Chill before rollingThe dough is soft from the milk and eggs. An hour in the refrigerator makes it far easier to roll thin and cut cleanly.
- YieldAbout four dozen 2 1/2-inch cookies, depending on how thin you roll.
Church and ladies'-aid cookbooks like this one were compiled by soliciting handwritten cards from members of the congregation, then setting them in type as cheaply as possible — which is plausibly how a list of ingredients comes to be split in half around its own method, as it is here. The recipes assume a cook who already knows what a sugar cookie should look like, so quantities of flour, spice and oven heat are left to judgment. Rolled sugar cookies of this kind, leavened with soda and scented with nutmeg, were a staple of Midwestern American baking through the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth; the nutmeg is often said to be a holdover from a period when imported whole spices kept indefinitely on the shelf, though that explanation is more tradition than documented fact. Libertyville is in Lake County, Illinois, and this book belongs to a large family of Protestant congregational fundraising cookbooks printed across the region between roughly 1890 and 1930.