Home › Cookies and Small Cakes › Brown-Sugar Cookies
Brown-Sugar Cookies
2 cups brown sugar 1 cup melted shortening 3 eggs 1/4 cup milk 1 tablespoon vanilla 1 teaspoon soda Flour to mix stiff Mix ingredients in order given. Add just enough flour to roll. Cut into shapes as desired. Sprinkle with brown sugar, and bake in a moderate oven (380 degrees F.).
A rolled cookie of the kind kept in a crock for weeks, sweet enough to need no icing. The one thing the recipe withholds is the flour, so the dough is yours to judge.
- "Flour to mix stiff"With this much sugar, fat and egg, expect somewhere between 4 and 5 cups of all-purpose flour before the dough will roll without sticking. Add it a cup at a time and stop as soon as the dough holds together and pulls cleanly from the bowl; every extra half cup makes a drier, harder cookie.
- Chill before rollingThe melted shortening leaves the dough slack and greasy while warm. An hour in the refrigerator firms it enough to roll thin and cut clean shapes, and it stops the cookies spreading into one another on the sheet.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives both the old term and a number, "a moderate oven (380 degrees F.)"; 375F is close enough. Rolled about 1/4 inch thick, the cookies need 8 to 10 minutes and should be set at the edges but still pale in the centre.
- ShorteningIn a book of this period this meant lard or a hydrogenated vegetable shortening. Melted butter gives better flavour and slightly more spread; melt and let it cool a little so it does not scramble the eggs.
- Soda without added acidThere is no sour milk or cream of tartar here. The lift comes from the acidity of the molasses in the brown sugar, so use a genuine soft brown sugar rather than a lightly tinted white one, and pack it when measuring.
- The vanillaA full tablespoon is what the recipe asks for, and a batch this size can carry it. If your extract is strong, two teaspoons will do.
- The sugar toppingSprinkle the brown sugar on after the shapes are cut and on the sheet, pressing it lightly so it adheres. It scorches faster than the dough, so watch the last two minutes.
- YieldSeveral dozen cookies from 2-inch cutters, depending how thin you roll. They keep in a tin and firm up as they sit, which is what they were made for.
Brown-sugar rolled cookies belong to the long American tradition of the keeping cookie: a stiff dough, cut in quantity, baked crisp and stored in a stoneware jar to be handed out over days rather than served at once. Brown sugar was generally the cheaper sugar through much of the nineteenth century, and its molasses content did double duty by supplying acid for the soda, which is why many old cookie recipes call for soda alone with no acid listed. The New Delineator Recipes came out of the Butterick publishing house, whose magazine The Delineator ran a domestic-science institute. The printed 380F sits alongside the older "moderate oven" rather than replacing it, a stage when cookbooks were beginning to give numbers as well as the traditional terms.