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Sugar Cookies
2 eggs 2 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon salt 2 cups flour Cream butter; add sugar, yolks well beaten, flour, baking powder, and salt, milk, and whites beaten to a stiff froth, and enough more flour to make of consistency to roll. Cut off a small piece of dough, roll on floured board, sprinkle with granulated sugar, shape with cooky cutter, and bake ten minutes. Save all trimmings until the last. Do not mix trimmings with fresh dough. cup butter 1 cup sugar 1 egg teaspoon salt
The ingredient list has been mangled in transcription — fractions have dropped out and two partial lists have collided — so treat the quantities as a sketch rather than a formula. The method itself is a standard creamed rolled-cookie procedure and is sound.
- The broken quantitiesThe page gives both "2 eggs" and "1 egg", the butter and salt amounts have lost their fractions, and milk appears in the method with no quantity listed at all. A rolled sugar cookie of this type would plausibly run something like 1/2 cup butter, 1 cup sugar, an egg, a little milk and enough flour to roll, but the printed figures cannot be reconciled and any reconstruction is guesswork; "1 teaspoon salt" against 2 cups flour may be a mis-set fraction.
- No oven temperatureThe book gives none, assuming a cook who judges her own range. Ten minutes for a thin rolled cookie implies a fairly hot oven; roughly 375-400F is a reasonable modern equivalent, and lower will mean a longer bake with less browning.
- "Consistency to roll"This is the hinge. Add flour only until the dough holds together and leaves the bowl clean; a stiff dough makes hard, cracker-like cookies. Chill it an hour before rolling and you can get away with far less flour.
- Beaten whitesSeparating the egg and folding in stiff whites is an older lightening habit, carried over here even though the recipe already contains baking powder. In a rolled cookie the gain is slight, and using whole eggs will give much the same result.
- Sugar on the boardThe recipe has you sprinkle granulated sugar over the rolled sheet before cutting rather than dusting on more flour, which sweetens the surface and avoids working extra flour in. Roll on flour, finish with sugar.
- Why the trimmings are kept separateRe-rolled scraps have absorbed board flour and been worked, so they spread less and bake tougher. Baking them together as the last tray means one uneven batch instead of every batch being uneven.
- YieldImpossible to state exactly, since the quantities are corrupt; a batch of this sort cut at about 2 1/2 inches and rolled to a scant quarter inch will give several dozen. Bake until the edges just take colour; they firm as they cool.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was written by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and it surrounded the promotional chocolate recipes with a full complement of plain household standards. A rolled sugar cookie is about as plain as the American baking repertoire gets: the word cooky itself comes from the Dutch koekje, a little cake, and entered English through New York rather than from Britain, where the equivalent was and is a biscuit. The instruction to reserve the trimmings is often taken as a sign of a book written for cooks who baked in quantity by hand — advice, one might say, about managing a whole afternoon's work rather than a single sheet pan.