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Cookies
5/8 cup butter 1 1/4 cups sugar 2 egg whites 3 cups flour 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg 4 teaspoons of baking powder 1/2 cup milk Cream the butter. Add the sugar gradually, and the beaten egg whites. Sift flour, baking powder and nutmeg together, and add alternately with the milk to the first mixture. Roll to one-third inch in thickness. Sprinkle with granulated sugar. Cut into shape with a cookie cutter. Place on buttered or floured tins, and bake in a hot oven until nicely browned. If desired, a raisin or walnut meat may be placed in each cookie before baking.
A plain rolled sugar cookie built on egg whites alone, the sort of recipe that exists to use up whites left over from custards and mayonnaise. A few of the measurements and oven directions need translating.
- 5/8 cup butterThat is 10 tablespoons, or 1 1/4 sticks. Have it soft but still cool for creaming.
- "A hot oven"For a thin rolled cookie this means 400–425F. At 400F they need roughly 8–10 minutes; watch the edges rather than the clock, as they go from pale to overbrowned quickly.
- The baking powderFour teaspoons to three cups of flour works out to about 1 1/3 teaspoons per cup, a little above the modern norm of 1 to 1 1/4. If you want a cookie that holds its cut shape rather than puffing, 2 1/2 to 3 teaspoons of a modern double-acting powder is enough.
- Chill before rollingThe instruction to roll is given without any resting step. A dough this soft is far easier to handle after an hour in the refrigerator, and chilled cookies keep the outline of the cutter.
- Sugar before cuttingNote the order: the sheet is rolled, then sugared, then cut, so the sugar is set into the surface before the cutter goes through. Scattering it after cutting mostly ends up on the pan.
- Thickness mattersOne-third inch is thicker than most modern rolled cookies and gives a soft, cakey result. Roll thinner if you want a crisp one, and shorten the bake accordingly.
- Buttered or floured tinsParchment does the same job with less browning on the bottom, which is useful given how quickly these colour at 400F.
- YieldAbout three to four dozen with a two-inch cutter, depending on how much dough is re-rolled.
This sits among recipes using whites of eggs — a grouping that made sense in a kitchen where yolks were constantly being drawn off for custards, sauces, salad dressings and gold cakes, leaving whites that would not keep long. Some cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries carried separate yolk and white sections for this reason, and a plain nutmeg-scented rolled cookie was among the more economical uses: no chocolate, no spice beyond what was in the cupboard, and a single raisin or walnut half pressed into the middle as the whole of the decoration.