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Caraway Cookies
1/2 cup butter or shortening 1 cup sugar 1 egg 2 cups flour 2 teaspoons baking-powder 1/2 teaspoon salt 3/4 cup milk 1 1/2 tablespoons caraway seeds Cream the butter or shortening with the sugar; add beaten egg. Mix and sift the flour, baking-powder, and salt, and add alternately with the milk to the first mixture. Add caraway seeds. Toss on lightly floured board. Roll out about one-half inch thick and cut in fancy shapes. Place on greased baking-sheet and bake in moderate oven (380-390 degrees F.) twelve to fifteen minutes.
A plain rolled sugar cookie carrying caraway, from the era when The Delineator's food pages were teaching standardized measuring. The dough as written is unusually soft for rolling, which is the one thing to manage.
- Oven temperatureThe stated 380-390F is what the book means by "moderate." Set a modern oven to 375F and check at ten minutes; these are thick cookies and the bottoms color before the tops do.
- The dough will be slackThree-quarters of a cup of milk against two cups of flour gives a batter closer to biscuit dough than cookie dough. Chill it well wrapped for at least an hour before rolling, and work with half at a time, keeping the rest cold.
- Flour on the board"Toss on lightly floured board" is doing real work here. Expect to add flour as you roll, and use a bench scraper to lift the shapes; a floured spatula is easier than trying to peel them.
- Half an inch is thickAt that thickness these bake up soft and cakey rather than crisp. Roll to a quarter inch if you want a snappier cookie, and cut the bake to eight or ten minutes.
- Flour typeHousehold flour of this period was often softer than modern all-purpose. If your dough seems tough or the cookies come out dry, replace a quarter of the flour with cake flour.
- CarawayA tablespoon and a half in a two-cup batch is a firm hand, and old seed tastes of dust. Buy fresh and warm it in a dry pan for under a minute before mixing to bring the flavor forward.
- Baking sheetGreased sheets were standard before parchment; parchment gives more even bottoms and no spread from melted fat. Cool the cookies a minute on the sheet before moving them, as they are fragile while hot.
- YieldYield depends on thickness and cutter size; expect roughly two to three dozen from a two-and-a-half-inch cutter, fewer if the shapes are large.
Caraway was one of the oldest seasonings in the English and American sweet baking repertoire, running from medieval comfits through seed cake to the caraway cookies and "seed cakes" that filled nineteenth-century receipt books. Its presence here appears to mark the tail end of that long habit: vanilla and chocolate seem to have been displacing the older aromatic seeds in American home baking by the interwar years, with caraway retreating toward rye bread and sauerkraut. The recipe itself is a good specimen of its moment, with standardized measurements, chemical leavening, an explicit oven temperature in degrees rather than a paper-browning test, and a common early-twentieth-century instruction to add dry and liquid ingredients alternately to a creamed base.