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Brown Sugar Cookies
1 cup brown sugar, 1 cup butter, 1 egg and 1 tbsp. milk; 2 cups pastry flour, 1 scant tsp. of Royal baking powder .
Mix and put on ice over night. Roll very thin and cut EVA WOOD. and cut
— Eva Wood
with doughnut cutter.
A plain rolled butter cookie with almost no liquid, which is why the dough must chill before it can be handled. The original gives no oven temperature or time at all.
- The garbled line"Roll very thin and cut EVA WOOD. and cut — Eva Wood with doughnut cutter" is a typesetting collision: Eva Wood is the contributor whose name belongs at the end. The instruction is simply to roll thin and cut with a doughnut cutter.
- Put on iceThis means the icebox, not the freezer. Refrigerate the dough overnight, wrapped or covered; it is very short and will be unworkable at room temperature.
- Pastry flourLower in protein than modern all-purpose. The closest substitute is a soft-wheat flour such as White Lily; failing that, replacing a tablespoon or two of each cup of all-purpose flour with cornstarch approximates it, though the full two tablespoons leans toward cake flour.
- Royal baking powderA cream-of-tartar powder in this period, single-acting. Modern double-acting baking powder works at the same measure — a scant teaspoon, meaning slightly under a level one.
- Brown sugarBrown sugar of this period was often darker and moister than today's light brown, though grades varied widely. Dark brown sugar may give a closer flavour; pack it when measuring.
- Oven and timeNone is given. Bake at 350–375°F for 6–8 minutes; rolled this thin they colour at the edges quickly and go from done to hard in under a minute.
- The doughnut cutterIt cuts a ring, not a round — these are meant to come out as small hoops. A 2½-inch cutter with a 1-inch centre is about right; any plain round cutter works if you do not mind losing the shape.
- YieldRoughly four to five dozen thin ring cookies, depending on cutter size and how thin "very thin" ends up being. Re-roll scraps once only; the dough toughens with handling and warms fast.
Church and society cookbooks like the Philathea — compiled by the Philathea class, the young women's counterpart to the Baraca men's Bible classes that spread through Protestant Sunday schools in the early twentieth century — were built from members' own cards, each recipe signed with the donor's name. That is why Eva Wood's name has ended up wedged into the middle of her own instructions. The recipes assume a great deal: no oven temperature, because a cook judged her own range by hand, and no baking time, because you watched. The naming of Royal baking powder is worth noticing too. Brand names appear constantly in these books, partly from habit and partly because Royal ran an aggressive campaign against alum-based competitors in exactly these years, and cooks who trusted a brand said so in print.