Home › Cookies and Small Cakes › Filled Cookies
Filled Cookies
1 cup sugar 1/2 cup shortening 1 egg 1/2 cup milk 3 1/2 cups flour 3 teaspoons baking-powder 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon vanilla Mix ingredients in order given, sifting the flour with the baking-powder and salt before adding it. Roll thin, cut, and put in greased pans. Place a teaspoon of filling on each, not allowing it to spread to the edge, place another cookie on top, press down the edges, and bake in shallow pans in a moderate oven (380-390 degrees F.).
For the filling, take: 1/2 cup sugar 1 tablespoon flour 1 cup chopped raisins 1/2 cup water Mix sugar and flour together, add to the other ingredients, and cook until thick, stirring constantly. Dates, figs, prunes, apricots, or any marmalade may be used instead of raisins.
A standard rolled sugar-cookie dough sandwiched around a cooked fruit paste. Two details decide whether they seal or leak.
- Cook the filling firstMake and fully cool the raisin filling before rolling the dough. Warm filling softens the bottom round and it will slide apart when you crimp.
- Oven temperatureThe stated 380-390F is what the book calls moderate; 375F on a modern thermostat is close enough. Bake 10-12 minutes, until the edges are just tan.
- Sealing the edgesKeep the filling well inside the rim, then press the two rounds together with the floured tines of a fork rather than fingers. Cut a small vent in the top round if your filling is loose, or it will burst at the seam.
- ShorteningThe book just says 'shortening', which by the late 1920s would most likely have been a hydrogenated vegetable shortening or lard. Either works; butter gives more flavour but spreads more, so chill the cut rounds before filling.
- Flour quantityThree and a half cups with only half a cup of milk gives a very stiff dough by modern flour standards. Hold back the last quarter-cup and add it only if the dough sticks to the roller.
- Rolling thinAbout 1/8 inch. Two thin rounds plus filling is already a substantial cookie, and thick dough makes the seam split.
- Greased pansParchment is easier and stops the sugary filling welding itself to the sheet where it seeps out.
- YieldRoughly 24 to 30 filled cookies from a 2 1/2-inch cutter, depending on how thin you roll.
Filled cookies of this kind appear in American home baking from the late nineteenth century onward, and raisin was among the commonest fillings; recipes under names like 'raisin-filled cookies' are not hard to find. The logic is thrift: a plain rolled dough of pantry staples wrapped around cheap dried fruit cooked down with sugar, flour and water into a paste that keeps well and travels in a lunch pail without crumbling. The line offering dates, figs, prunes, apricots or any marmalade is the sort of substitution list common in New Delineator Recipes and in magazine cookery of the period, where a cook might reasonably use whatever dried fruit was already in the house.