Home › Cookies and Small Cakes › Christmas Peppernuts
Christmas Peppernuts
2 cups brown sugar 2 eggs 1 teaspoon soda 1 tablespoon hot water 1 cup chopped nuts 2 teaspoons cinnamon 1 teaspoon nutmeg 3 1/2 cups sifted bread flour Mix the sugar with the well-beaten eggs, add the soda dissolved in hot water, the nuts, and the spices sifted with the flour. Add more flour if necessary to make a dough stiff enough to roll. Roll out until the dough is about one-eighth inch thick. Cut in tiny rounds about as large as a quarter of a dollar and bake in a quick oven (400 degrees F.) until brown. Roll at once in powdered sugar.
A lean, fatless spice cookie: no butter, no liquid beyond a spoonful of hot water and the eggs, so the dough behaves more like a stiff gingerbread paste than a rolled sugar cookie. The whole thing turns on rolling thin and baking briefly.
- OvenThe recipe gives its own number, 400F, and it is right. At that heat quarter-sized rounds an eighth of an inch thick brown in roughly 5 to 8 minutes, so watch them from the five-minute mark rather than the clock.
- Bread flour is deliberateBread flour -- Period bread flour was the strong, high-protein flour, and here it gives the dough enough structure to be rolled thin without a speck of fat. Modern bread flour works as written; all-purpose gives a softer, more crumbly nut.
- No pepper, despite the nameMany peppernut recipes carry black or white pepper, cardamom, cloves or anise. This one is cinnamon and nutmeg only. A quarter teaspoon of finely ground black pepper and a pinch of cloves brings it closer to the German original if that is what you are after.
- Working the doughTwo cups of sugar to two eggs makes a dry, sandy mass at first that comes together with kneading. Resist adding water; the extra flour the recipe mentions is only for a dough too soft to roll.
- Rolling and cuttingA quarter of a dollar is about an inch across. Chopped nuts fight a thin roll, so chop them very fine, almost to a meal, or the dough tears. A small round cutter, a thimble or the wide end of a piping tip all work.
- Sugar while hot"Roll at once in powdered sugar" is the hinge. The surface has to be hot enough for the sugar to cling and partly melt; cooled cookies shed it. Work in small batches straight off the sheet.
- Yield and keepingKeeping -- They bake hard and are meant to be stored in a tin for weeks, softening slowly; a slice of apple in the tin speeds that along.
Peppernuts are the English name for German Pfeffernüsse and Dutch pepernoten, small hard spice cookies associated with Christmas and, in the Netherlands, with St. Nicholas Day. The "pepper" in the name is generally taken to refer to the whole mixture of costly imported spices rather than black pepper alone, though pepper often appeared in the dough as well. Recipes crossed to America with German-speaking settlers and were carried on especially in Mennonite and Pennsylvania German households, where enormous batches were baked in advance and kept in tins through the holidays. The version here has been thoroughly Americanized: brown sugar and soda in place of the older honey-and-potash formulas, no pepper, and a finished coat of powdered sugar.