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Cocoanut Cookies
1/4 cup shortening 1/2 cup sugar 1 egg 1/2 teaspoon lemon juice or extract 1/2 cup milk 1 1/2 cups flour 3 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 1/8 teaspoon salt 2 cups cocoanut Cream shortening; add sugar, beaten egg and lemon juice; mix in milk slowly; add flour, baking powder and salt which have been sifted together; add cocoanut. The batter should be quite stiff. Drop by small spoonfuls on greased pan. Do not smooth over, but allow space for spreading. Bake in moderate oven 15 to 20 minutes.
A plain drop cookie built around a large quantity of coconut. The dough is wetter than most modern cookie doughs, and the coconut is what holds it together.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperature; a moderate oven of the period is usually reckoned at about 350-375F. Small drop cookies of this size will be done at the shorter end of the recipe's 15-to-20-minute range, so start looking for browned edges before the full 20.
- That much baking powderThree teaspoons to a cup and a half of flour reads as extreme today. Royal was a tartrate/cream-of-tartar powder that released most of its gas in the bowl rather than in the oven; a modern double-acting powder is generally reckoned to go further, and something in the region of half the stated amount is a reasonable starting point, with less risk of the soapy, metallic taste that too much powder leaves.
- CocoanutCoconut of this period was often sold as dry unsweetened shred, closer to today's desiccated coconut than to the moist sweetened flake sold in bags, though sweetened packaged coconut also existed. Sweetened flake will make a noticeably sweeter, softer cookie; if that is what you have, cut the sugar back.
- Shortening1/4 cup means 4 tablespoons of any solid fat — lard, vegetable shortening or butter. Butter browns faster and tastes better here; the recipe was written for whatever was in the house.
- Lemon juice or extractThese are not interchangeable in strength. Half a teaspoon of extract gives a clear lemon note; half a teaspoon of juice gives almost none and functions mainly as a trace of acid. Use zest from half a lemon if you want the flavor to register.
- "Quite stiff"This is the hinge. The half cup of milk is enough to slacken the dough badly, so add it slowly and stop when the mixture will hold a peak on the spoon. If it runs, work in another two or three tablespoons of coconut rather than flour.
- Pan and spacingParchment is easier than greasing, since the exposed coconut shreds catch and stick. Leave two inches between spoonfuls — the instruction not to flatten them is deliberate, as they settle and spread on their own.
- YieldRoughly 30 to 36 small cookies. They are best the day they are baked; the coconut draws moisture and they soften in a tin overnight.
The New Royal Cook Book belongs to a long line of promotional cookbooks issued by the Royal Baking Powder Company, which distributed them free or for a few cents from the later nineteenth century onward — every recipe that could plausibly take baking powder does, and the brand name is written into the ingredient list rather than left generic. Coconut reached American home baking as an imported shelf-stable good: by the late nineteenth century desiccated shredded coconut was being packed commercially for grocers, and it turns up constantly in the cookie and cake chapters of these company books because it was cheap, kept well, and made a plain butter-and-sugar dough taste like something. The spelling cocoanut, standard in English-language cookbooks through the nineteenth century and lingering into the twentieth, is generally traced to the old confusion with cocoa; it faded from print by mid-century.