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Sugar Cookies
2 TEASPOONS BAKING POWDER 1/2 TEASPOON SALT 1/2 CUP SHORTENING I CUP SUGAR I EGG, WELL BEATEN I TEASPOON VANILLA OR LEMON EXTRACT OR 1/2 TEASPOON ALMOND EXTRACT 1/2 CUP MILK Sift flour, baking powder and salt together. Cream shortening, gradually add sugar, and cream together until light, add egg and flavoring and beat together. Add flour mixture and milk alternately. Roll out, cut into shapes, sprinkle with sugar, and bake until light brown at 375°.
Chocolate Sugar Cookies:
Add 2 squares melted chocolate to egg mixture before adding flour; or add 1/2 cup cocoa to flour mixture. Spiced Cookies:
Add 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon and 1/4 teaspoon ground ginger to flour mixture.
A plain rolled sugar cookie with two variations, written for a cook who already knew what cookie dough should feel like. A few of its assumptions need translating.
- Flour quantityThe ingredient list as printed begins with the baking powder, so no flour measure is given. For this amount of shortening, sugar, egg and milk, a rollable sugar cookie dough normally takes somewhere between 2¾ and 3¼ cups of all-purpose flour; add the lower amount first and work up until the dough holds together without sticking.
- Oven temperature and time375°F is stated, which is right for rolled cookies. No time is given: thin cookies take 7 to 9 minutes, and "light brown" means browning at the edges only. They firm up as they cool.
- ShorteningHere this most likely means hydrogenated vegetable shortening, though in recipes of this vintage the word also covered lard or butter; the vegetable fat gives a paler, cakier cookie. Butter substitutes cup for cup, though the dough will spread a little more.
- Chill before rollingHalf a cup of milk makes a soft dough that will fight the rolling pin at room temperature. An hour in the refrigerator, wrapped, is the difference between clean cut shapes and sticky patchwork.
- Rolling thicknessRoll to about ⅛ inch for crisp cookies, ¼ inch for a softer one, and keep every sheet the same thickness so they finish together. Flour the board lightly; excess flour makes the cookies dry.
- Chocolate variation"2 squares" means two 1-ounce squares of unsweetened baking chocolate, i.e. 2 ounces; check the packaging of whatever bar you buy, since section sizes vary. If you take the cocoa route instead, the dough will need a spoonful or two more milk.
- YieldExpect roughly 3 to 4 dozen cookies from a 2½-inch cutter. The dough keeps several days refrigerated and freezes well as a flat disc.
Rolled sugar cookies of this type are the plainest of American cookie doughs — fat, sugar, egg, flour, a liquid to bind — and cookbooks of the 1940s and 1950s routinely printed one master recipe with a tail of variations, exactly as here, on the assumption that a household needed one dough and not six. Sugar cookies of this kind keep well in a tin, better than anything filled or iced. The page carries language about race that the editor's note flags; it is preserved here as printed for the record.