Nut Cookies
teaspoon salt 1 cup flour 1 cup milk 1 cup chopped nut meats flavoring Mix like Sugar Cookies. spoon on to buttered sheet.
Bake in quick oven, Mix like Sugar Cookies. Add nuts; drop from a tea- Decorate with halves of nuts. 4 cup butter 1 cup brown sugar 1 egg
A plain drop cookie built on the book's Sugar Cookie method: cream the fat and sugar, beat in the egg, add the dry ingredients alternately with the liquid, then fold in nuts. The proportions as printed are unusually wet for a cookie, so read the notes before you scale it.
- The butter quantity is unclearThe printed "4 cup butter" cannot be right against 1 cup sugar and 1 cup flour. A quarter cup is the likeliest reading, but the original does not say so; treat it as an ambiguous figure rather than a conversion.
- The liquid is out of proportionA full cup of milk against a single cup of flour gives a batter, not a dough that will drop and hold its shape. Expect to add flour until the mixture mounds on the spoon, or work from a modern drop-cookie ratio.
- No leavening is listedMany sugar-cookie doughs of this era carried baking powder, or saleratus with cream of tartar. None appears in what is printed here, though the ingredient list is plainly incomplete and any leavening may belong to the sugar-cookie recipe it refers to. If the cookies spread and stay dense, about a teaspoon of baking powder will help.
- Quick ovenPeriod equivalences for a 'quick oven' vary, generally falling somewhere in the 400-450F range. For a drop cookie the top of that is aggressive; 400F for 8-10 minutes gives the browned edge intended without scorching the nut meats.
- Nut meats"Meats" simply means the shelled kernels. Walnuts, pecans and hickory nuts were common choices; almonds and hazelnuts want a light toast first to bring out flavour lost in the baking.
- FlavoringUnspecified. Vanilla, lemon and rose extracts were all in use at the time. A teaspoon of vanilla, or half a teaspoon of vanilla with a little grated lemon rind, suits the brown sugar.
- Buttered sheetBrown sugar and butter stick hard. Parchment does what the buttered tin was meant to do and lets the cookies come off whole.
- YieldOn these quantities, roughly two to three dozen small cookies, depending on how heaped the teaspoon is. Leave a good two inches between them; they spread.
Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like most house cookbooks of its day it surrounded the promotional chocolate recipes with a full set of ordinary domestic ones so the volume could serve as a working kitchen manual. Nut cookies belong to that second category: a variation instruction rather than a recipe in its own right, telling the cook to make the book's sugar cookies and fold in whatever nut meats the household had cracked. No particular nut is named. The brown sugar here rather than white is what separates it from the plain sugar cookie, giving a softer, chewier crumb that suits the nuts.