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Tea Cakes
3 eggs. 2-3 cup butter or 1/2 cup crisco. 2 cups sugar. 3 level teaspoons baking powder. 3 cups flour sifted 3 times with powder. Beat eggs light, add sugar, then softened butter. Mix into flour and add enough flour to roll into soft dough. Roll thin, sprinkle with sugar, and cut with fancy cutter. Bake in quick oven.
A plain rolled sugar cookie, written in the shorthand of a cook who already knew what the dough should feel like. Two things need pinning down before you start: the butter quantity and what "quick oven" means for something rolled thin.
- The butter measurement"2-3 cup butter" is probably a typesetting loss of 2/3 cup, which would square with the 1/2 cup Crisco given as the alternative (shortening being denser in fat than butter). Two to three cups of butter against three cups of flour would be an entirely different, unrollable dough.
- CriscoCrisco was a new product in this period and turns up often in cookery of the time. Any modern all-vegetable shortening substitutes directly; butter gives more flavor and slightly more spread.
- "Quick oven"Period sources put this at roughly 400-450F. For thin rolled cookies, the lower end is safer: 400-425F for 5 to 7 minutes, until the edges just color. Thin sugar dough goes from pale to burnt very fast at that heat.
- Flour by feelThe three cups sifted with the baking powder is a starting point, not the total; the instruction to "add enough flour to roll into soft dough" means you will likely work in another half cup. Stop as soon as the dough stops sticking to the board, or the cookies turn hard rather than crisp.
- Chill before rollingNot in the original, and not needed with three cups of flour beaten into softened butter and eggs, but half an hour in the refrigerator makes "roll thin" much easier and keeps the fancy cutter's edges sharp in the oven.
- The sugar goes on before cuttingSprinkle the sheet of rolled dough, then cut. Pressing the sugar in with a light pass of the rolling pin keeps it from sliding off onto the baking sheet, where it scorches.
- YieldA large batch of thin two-inch cookies; the exact count depends on cutter size and how thin you roll. Baking powder is the only leavening, so there is no soda-and-sour-milk timing to worry about; the dough holds a day in the refrigerator.
- Filed oddlyThis appears in the vegetable section of the book. Nothing in the recipe belongs to a vegetable dish; the reason for the placement is not recorded.
"Tea cakes" in American cookbooks of the early twentieth century can mean this: a thin, sweet rolled cookie cut into shapes, meant to be handed round with afternoon tea rather than eaten as a dessert course. The name is older than the form, and elsewhere covers small yeast-raised buns, which is why period recipes sharing the title can look nothing alike. Mrs. Wilson wrote for the Philadelphia Public Ledger during and just after the First World War, when household economy was a constant theme, and the alternative of a half cup of shortening for two-thirds of a cup of butter was a widespread convention of the period: butter was scarce and dear, and the newly available all-vegetable shortenings were promoted hard as substitutes. The recipe's terse, feel-it-out phrasing is also typical of newspaper cookery, where column inches were short and readers were assumed to have rolled a cookie dough before.