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Currant Drop Cakes
1 cup powdered sugar 1/3 cup butter 1 egg 1⅔ cups flour 1/3 cup sour cream 3/4 teaspoon soda 1 teaspoon hot water 1/4 cup currants Stir the butter and sugar to a cream; add the egg, beaten until very light, then the sifted flour. Beat all well together; add the cream and the soda dissolved in hot water. Last add the currants, washed and drained and mixed with a teaspoon of flour. Drop the mixture on buttered tins and bake in a hot oven.
A small-batch drop cookie of the plainest sort, leavened by soda reacting with sour cream. Two terms in the ingredient list mean something different now than they did when it was written.
- "Powdered sugar" is not confectioners' sugarIn American cookbooks of this period powdered sugar generally meant sugar ground fine from loaf sugar — closer to today's caster or superfine sugar. Use granulated or superfine; modern powdered sugar contains cornstarch and will give a softer, cakier result.
- The flour quantity"12/3 cups" is a typesetting collapse of 1 2/3 cups. Measure it as sifted flour, roughly 200 g.
- CurrantsThese are dried Zante currants, small dried grapes, not fresh red or black currants. Tossing them with a teaspoon of flour keeps them suspended rather than sinking through the batter as it spreads.
- Sour cream then and nowPeriod sour cream was cream soured naturally, thinner and sharper than the cultured product sold today. Modern sour cream works, but if the dough seems stiff, thin it with a teaspoon of buttermilk; the acid is what the soda needs.
- Soda in hot waterDissolving the soda before adding it helps distribute it evenly and avoids pockets of undissolved soda, which taste bitter. Add it at the end and get the cakes into the oven promptly — the reaction with the sour cream begins at once.
- "A hot oven"Period guides vary, but a hot oven is usually glossed at somewhere around 400–425°F. For small drop cakes on a modern sheet pan, 400°F for about 10–12 minutes should suit; they are done when the edges are set and just coloured.
- Buttered tinsButter alone on a bare sheet browns the bottoms fast. Parchment on the sheet gives a more even base, and space the drops about two inches apart.
- YieldAbout two dozen small cakes from teaspoon-sized drops. They are best the day they are baked; the sour cream keeps them tender for a second day in a tin.
Drop cakes sit at the point where the cake chapter of an American cookbook shades into what we would now call cookies — a stiff batter dropped by the spoonful rather than rolled and cut, which saved both time and a floured board. The soda-and-sour-cream leavening is older than commercial baking powder and persisted in home baking long after baking powder was available, plausibly because farm and dairy households had soured cream to use up. The currants are Zante currants, dried in Greece and shipped in bulk; by 1900 they were a cheap, shelf-stable staple in American pantries and turn up in everything from buns to puddings.