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Pecan Cookies
1/2 cup butter. 1 cup sugar. 1 cup sweet milk. 2 teaspoons baking powder. 1 cup chopped pecans. 3 1/2 cups flour.
Drop on greased paper in pan and cook as tea cakes.
A skeletal formula of the kind Mrs. Wilson printed by the hundred: ingredients listed, method assumed. A few gaps need filling before it will work on a modern range.
- "Cook as tea cakes"This is the whole method, and it assumes the reader already knew how tea cakes were baked. The original gives neither temperature nor time; a moderately hot oven, in the region of 375F, for around 10-12 minutes, until the edges color and the centers are set, is a reasonable modern guess rather than anything the recipe states.
- Sweet milkOrdinary fresh whole milk, specified only to distinguish it from the sour or buttermilk that older recipes often called for. Baking powder, not soda, is the leavening here, so no acid is wanted.
- The dough is stiffThree and a half cups of flour against one cup of milk and half a cup of butter gives a thick, heavy dough rather than a pourable batter. Expect to push it off the spoon, and add a spoonful or two of milk if it will not leave the spoon at all.
- No eggThe list contains no egg. Without one the cookies will bake up short and crumbly, closer to a plain biscuit than a chewy cookie; whether the omission was intended or an error in the printing cannot be told from the page.
- Greased paperParchment on a sheet pan, ungreased, does the same job better. If you use parchment there is no need to butter it.
- PecansThe recipe says chopped; chop them fairly fine so the pieces distribute evenly through a stiff dough.
- YieldAbout three to four dozen small cookies, depending on how heaped the spoon is. They keep well in a tin for several days and are meant to be eaten dry, with tea.
Mary A. Wilson was a Philadelphia domestic-science writer whose cook books were assembled in the years around the First World War, when flour, sugar, butter and eggs were subject to conservation pressure and household columns were expected to teach economy as much as cookery. That context shows in the recipe's frugality: no eggs at all, a single half-cup of butter stretched across three and a half cups of flour, and milk doing the work of binding. "Tea cakes" in American usage of the period generally meant a plain, sweet, biscuit-like cookie served with afternoon tea rather than the yeasted English bun of the same name, and "cook as tea cakes" was shorthand a contemporary reader would have needed no help with. Pecans, native to the American South and Midwest and by then widely marketed shelled, were cheap and turn up constantly in cookies, cakes and candies of these decades.