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Almond Bars
1 1/2 cups melted shortening 1 cup brown sugar 1 cup white sugar 3 eggs, well beaten 1/4 pound almonds, blanched 3 teaspoons baking powder 4 1/2 cups flour Cream shortening and sugar together; add well beaten eggs. Mix in almonds, and baking powder sifted with flour. Mix well and form into a roll. Chill in ice box over night, slice with sharp knife, sprinkle with sugar and bake in a hot oven (425 degrees F.) for 8 minutes. Makes seven dozen 3-inch cookies.
An icebox cookie dough of the 1930s type: stiff, sugar-heavy, sliced thin from a chilled log and baked fast. The whole recipe hinges on the overnight chill, which firms the fat enough that the roll slices cleanly instead of crumbling.
- Melted, then creamedThe ingredient list calls the shortening melted while the method says to cream it with the sugar. Melted fat will not hold air, so treat this as a stirred dough: combine the warm shortening with both sugars until smooth, then proceed. Let the mixture cool before adding the eggs so they do not begin to set.
- Shortening quantity1 1/2 cups of shortening to 4 1/2 cups of flour is a very rich dough by current standards, and it will be soft and greasy at room temperature. Weigh it if you can (about 10 1/2 oz) and keep the log cold right up to the moment you slice.
- AlmondsA quarter pound of blanched almonds is roughly 3/4 to 1 cup whole. Chop them fairly fine; whole or halved nuts tear the slices apart under the knife. Blanching means slipping the skins after a minute in boiling water, or buy blanched slivered almonds and chop them.
- Ice boxThe refrigerator. Wrap the roll tightly in parchment or plastic so the surface does not dry and crack, and give it a full 8 hours or overnight. Two hours in the freezer will do at a push.
- SlicingAim for about 1/4 inch. Thinner slices burn in the short bake; thicker ones stay doughy in the middle. Rotate the log a quarter turn every few cuts so it keeps its round section rather than flattening on one side.
- Oven and time425F is genuinely hot for a sugar-rich cookie and 8 minutes is the outside limit. Watch from 6 minutes and pull them when the edges are brown and the centres still look pale; they firm as they cool. Baking at 375F for 10 to 12 minutes gives a more even result on modern thin sheet pans.
- YieldSeven dozen is plausible for the full batch, which means a log of considerable length. Divide the dough into two or three rolls for easier handling, bearing in mind the recipe's stated 3-inch finished size, and halve the recipe if seven dozen cookies is more than you want.
- Sugar on topSprinkle granulated sugar over the cut slices once they are on the pan, not before slicing, or the knife drags it into the dough. Coarse sanding sugar holds its sparkle better through a hot oven.
Icebox cookies belong to the period when mechanical refrigeration was becoming common in American kitchens. A dough that could be mixed one evening, held overnight, and sliced and baked at will the next day suited a household without staff, and it produced the thin, uniform, faintly commercial-looking wafer that home bakers of the era admired. Almonds would have been a comparative expense, and blanching them was work. The pairing of brown and white sugar in equal parts was common at the time, the brown supplying colour and a faint caramel note without the softness that an all-brown dough would bring.