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Peanut Cookies
1/4 cup butter or shortening 1 cup brown sugar 2 eggs 1/4 cup milk 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 cups flour 2 teaspoons baking-powder 1 to 2 cups chopped peanuts Melt fat, add brown sugar, eggs and milk. Add sifted salt, flour and baking-powder, and chopped peanuts. Drop by teaspoonfuls on greased pans, an inch or two apart. Place a half peanut on each and bake in a quick oven (400 degrees F.).
A plain drop cookie from the era when peanuts were a cheap, plentiful pantry nut rather than a specialty item. The method is unusual in that the fat is melted rather than creamed, which gives a chewier, cakier cookie.
- Melted fat, no creamingBecause the butter is melted, there is no aeration from creaming; the lift comes entirely from the baking powder. Let the melted fat cool slightly before adding the eggs so they do not scramble.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe helpfully gives its own number for "quick oven" — 400°F. Expect 8 to 10 minutes for teaspoon-sized drops; they are done when the edges have set and browned and the centers still look slightly soft.
- PeanutsThe 1-to-2-cup range is genuinely open. One cup gives a cookie with peanuts in it; two gives something closer to a peanut cluster held together by batter. Unsalted roasted peanuts work best, since the dough already carries salt.
- Shortening"Shortening" in an American book of this period means lard or a hydrogenated vegetable fat such as Crisco. Butter gives better flavor here, and it is the option listed first.
- SpacingAn inch or two apart is tight by modern standards for a soft drop dough. Two inches is the safer figure unless your peanuts are chopped fine enough to stiffen the batter.
- Greased pansParchment paper does the same job with less sticking, and the brown sugar in this dough scorches readily on a bare hot pan.
- The peanut on topPress the half peanut in gently while the dough is still wet; once the surface sets in the oven it will not hold.
- YieldNot given in the original. Teaspoon-sized drops from this quantity produce roughly three and a half to four dozen small cookies.
The Delineator was Butterick's women's magazine, and its recipe collections were pitched at middle-class households cooking economically. Peanuts belong squarely in that project: grown widely in the American South and cheap by the pound, they were promoted through the early twentieth century as an inexpensive source of protein and fat, appearing in soups, loaves, sandwich fillings and baking, in place of costlier nuts such as almonds or walnuts. The melted-fat, drop-cookie method here is a fast route to a batch of cookies without a mixer.