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Seed Cookies
Cream 1/3 cup of margarine with 1 cup sugar, then add in order given: 1 well beaten egg, 1/4 cup milk, 1/3 teaspoon baking soda dissolved in the milk, 1 saltspoon each of nutmeg and cinnamon. 1 teaspoon caraway seed, and flour to roll.
Chill, roll thin, sift granulated sugar over the cookies, press it down lightly, crease the dough, and cut in fancy shapes. Bake in moderate (375 degrees) oven.
A plain rolled sugar cookie scented with caraway, of the sort that kept well in a tin through the holidays. The recipe assumes you know how much flour a soft dough will take, so the flour is the only real judgement call.
- Flour to rollExpect roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour. Add it in stages until the dough just stops sticking to the bowl; overshooting is what makes these cookies hard rather than crisp.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So a quarter teaspoon each of nutmeg and cinnamon, which is restrained by modern taste and can be doubled without harming the caraway.
- Baking soda in the milkA third of a teaspoon is an odd amount to measure; a generous quarter teaspoon is close enough. Dissolving it in the milk is worth doing, as it helps keep the soda from leaving brown specks in the pale dough.
- The chill is not optionalWith only a third of a cup of fat and an egg, this dough is soft and sticky at room temperature. An hour in the refrigerator, and rolling one portion at a time while the rest stays cold, is what allows it to be rolled thin enough.
- Sugar before cuttingSifting granulated sugar over the sheet of dough and pressing it in lightly, rather than sprinkling on shaped cookies, gives an even crust and helps keep the sugar from sliding off in the oven.
- "Crease the dough"Most likely a light scoring of lines across the rolled sheet with the back of a knife before cutting the shapes, for a ridged surface. Do not cut through.
- Oven and timeThe recipe names 375F, which is at the brisk end of moderate. Thin cookies bake in 6 to 9 minutes; pull them when the edges have just colored, as they crisp on the sheet.
- CarawayA teaspoon of whole seed is mild once spread through the batch. Warming the seed in a dry pan for a minute before adding it sharpens the flavor considerably.
- YieldDepending on your cutter, about four to five dozen thin cookies.
Caraway seed cookies belong to a long tradition of English and German seed baking, descended from the seed cake that appears in household books well before sugar became cheap; the seed was long held to aid digestion, which is one reason it turns up in cakes served at the end of a heavy meal. Caraway had begun to fall out of American favor, retreating toward rye bread and sauerkraut. What marks the recipe as belonging to its own moment is the margarine in the first line: creamed straight into the sugar without apology. Butter was the older standard, and the substitution here reflects price as much as anything.