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Chocolate Powder (Cups flour teaspoons baking)
2 cups flour 2 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon salt Mix ingredients in order given. Chill, roll 1/4 inch thick, and shape with cooky cutter. Bake in moderate oven. 1/2 cup butter 1 cup sugar
A plain rolled-and-cut cookie dough of the sort that fills the back pages of turn-of-the-century American dessert chapters. The method is compressed to a single line, so most of the work is in reading between it.
- Moderate ovenIn books of this vintage a moderate oven is usually taken as about 350-375F. Rolled cookies at that heat generally need somewhere around 8 to 12 minutes and are done when the edges colour and the centres no longer look wet; they firm as they cool.
- Creaming orderAs printed here the ingredients run flour, baking powder and salt first, with butter and sugar last, which looks like a transcription mix-up; a dough of this type is normally made by the cake method, creaming butter and sugar first and then sifting in the dry ingredients. Creaming until the mixture lightens helps keep a cut cookie tender rather than hard.
- Rolling thicknessThe text as it stands reads "roll inch thick," almost certainly a dropped fraction, since doughs of this type are normally rolled between 1/8 and 1/4 inch. Thinner gives a crisp snap, thicker a soft cookie; whichever you choose, keep it even or the thin edges will scorch before the middles set.
- The chilling step is not optionalA butter dough at room temperature will stick, tear and spread in the oven. An hour in the refrigerator, and a second short chill for the cut shapes on their sheet, is the difference between sharp edges and puddles.
- SaltA full teaspoon for two cups of flour is on the high side by modern taste. If you are using salted butter, half a teaspoon of fine salt may suit better.
- Cooky cutterAny metal cutter works; dip it in flour between cuts. Gather and re-roll scraps only once, since worked dough toughens.
- YieldDepending on how thin you roll, this quantity gives roughly three to six dozen two-inch cookies.
Lowney's Cook Book was issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate and cocoa manufacturer, and belongs to a whole genre of promotional cookbooks that American food companies published in the early 1900s. The recipes doubled as advertising: a household that owned the book was expected to reach for Lowney's cocoa, Lowney's baking chocolate and Lowney's premium chocolate whenever a dessert called for it. Plain rolled cookie doughs like this one served as the base for dozens of variations across such books, dressed up with spice, nuts, grated chocolate or a boiled chocolate icing, and it seems likely that a single set of proportions a cook already knew by heart could in this way be turned toward the sponsor's product.