Nut Bars
1/2 cup shortening 1 1/2 cups sugar 2 eggs 4 tablespoons milk 4 cups flour 3 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 1/8 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup blanched almonds Cream shortening and sugar together; add slowly beaten yolk of one egg; add whites of two eggs well beaten and three tablespoons milk; mix well together. Sift together flour, baking powder and salt, add one cup at a time. More flour may be needed, as dough must not stick. Divide into two parts, roll one part at a time 1/4-inch thick on floured board; cut into bars 1 by 3 inches. Brush with yolk of remaining egg mixed with one tablespoon milk and sprinkle with chopped nuts. Bake in moderate oven about 15 minutes.
A stiff rolled cookie dough of the German bakery type, closer to a shortbread than to a drop cookie. Two things govern the result: the dough must stay dry enough to roll thin, and the bars must come out before the edges color.
- Oven temperature"Moderate oven" in books of this period generally means somewhere in the 350-375F range. Fifteen minutes is plausible for quarter-inch bars; they should be pale gold at the edges and still slightly soft in the center when you pull them.
- ShorteningIn period usage this means a solid fat — lard, vegetable shortening, or butter. Butter gives the best flavor and browns more, so check at 12 minutes if you use it.
- How the eggs are dividedOne yolk goes in with the creamed sugar, both whites are beaten and folded in, and the second yolk is held back for the glaze. Separate both eggs before you start rather than discovering this mid-recipe.
- Flour by weightFour cups measured in a period kitchen could be anywhere from roughly 16 to 20 oz depending on whether the flour was sifted, spooned, or scooped. Start at the low end and add more only if the dough sticks to the board, as the recipe directs.
- Blanched almondsBlanched means skinned: cover with boiling water for a minute, drain, and slip the skins off. Sold today as "blanched slivered" or "blanched whole" almonds, either of which can be chopped for the topping. Note that the half cup listed is used entirely as the sprinkle, not stirred into the dough.
- RollingChill the dough 30 minutes before rolling; the fat-and-egg-white dough handles far better cold. Roll on a floured board, cut with a knife or pastry wheel, and transfer with an offset spatula.
- Glaze orderBrush the egg-yolk wash on and press the chopped nuts down lightly before baking, or they fall off the finished bars. Do the glazing on the sheet pan, not on the board.
- YieldAbout five to six dozen bars, 1 by 3 inches. They keep well in a tin for a week and firm up as they sit, which is the point of the style.
This comes from one of the Royal Baking Powder Company's promotional cookbooks, a genre that flooded American kitchens in the late nineteenth century: free or near-free booklets in which every leavened recipe named the brand by measure, so that the housewife learned her proportions and the trademark together. The cookie itself resembles the central European nut bar — a comparison often drawn with the German Mandelschnitten and its Austrian and Swiss relatives — a stiff rolled dough cut into fingers, washed with egg yolk and strewn with chopped almonds. The egg-yolk glaze gives the shine and deep color that a plain dough will not develop at 350F. Almonds, sold blanched or blanchable by the pound, were among the baking nuts of the period.