Home › Cookies › Cocoa Cookies
Cocoa Cookies
4 tablespoons shortening 1 cup sugar 1/4 cup milk 1 egg 2 cups flour 3 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup cocoa Cream shortening and sugar together; add milk and well-beaten egg; mix well; sift flour, baking powder, cocoa and salt together and add. Roll out 1/4-inch thick on floured board; cut with cookie cutter. Bake in hot oven about 12 minutes.
A plain rolled chocolate cookie from a baking-powder company's pamphlet, built to be stiff enough to cut with a cutter. A few conversions and one timing correction are all it needs.
- Shortening4 tablespoons is 1/4 cup, 2 oz. The original means solid vegetable shortening or lard; butter works and tastes better, though the dough will spread slightly more and brown faster.
- "Hot oven"In books of this period a hot oven is 400-425F. Set 400F, and start checking at 8 minutes rather than 12 — thin rolled cookies with cocoa in them scorch quietly, since the dark dough hides the browning.
- Judging donenessBecause you cannot go by colour, go by feel: the tops should look dry and matte and the edges firm when nudged. They finish setting on the sheet.
- The cocoaUnsweetened natural cocoa is what was meant. Dutch-process will work, giving a milder flavour and a darker cookie; the 1/2 cup is also a substantial share of the dry ingredients, so measure it spooned and levelled rather than scooped.
- Baking powder3 teaspoons to 2 cups flour is generous by current practice — 1 1/2 teaspoons per cup against a modern norm of about 1 to 1 1/4 — and unsurprising in a book published to sell baking powder. Two teaspoons of modern double-acting powder gives a cleaner flavour with little loss of lift.
- RollingThe dough is stiff and slightly sticky warm. Chill it 30 minutes wrapped before rolling to 1/4 inch, and use as little bench flour as possible, since flour shows white on a dark cookie.
- YieldRoughly 3 to 4 dozen cookies from a 2-inch cutter. They are dry and firm, and keep well in a tin.
The New Royal Cook Book belongs to a long line of pamphlets issued by the Royal Baking Powder Company, whose product was a cream-of-tartar powder sold at a premium against cheaper alum-based rivals. The recipes exist to demonstrate the tin, which is why the brand name appears in the ingredient list itself and why the leavening is used with a free hand. Cocoa cookies like this one became common in American home baking only after cocoa powder — the defatted, easily dissolved product generally traced to the Van Houten press of the 1820s — grew cheap and reliably packaged in the later nineteenth century. Before that, chocolate in a household kitchen usually meant a hard cake of ground cacao to be grated or melted. A rolled-and-cut cookie made with cocoa rather than melted chocolate is a thoroughly early twentieth-century object: cheap, shelf-stable, and no harder to make than a sugar cookie.