Home › Doughnuts and Cookies › Delicious Cookies
Delicious Cookies
1/2 cup butter and lard mixed 3 cups brown sugar 3 eggs 1/2 cup top milk 1½ tsp. Slade's cream tartar 1 tsp. soda 1 tsp. almond extract 1/4 cup ground almonds 1 tsp. Slade's cinnamon pinch of salt flour to stiffen Mix in order given, roll out thin and cut. Sprinkle each cookie with a frosting made by chopping loaf sugar and nuts together.
— Mrs. Joseph Legg
A rolled sugar cookie built on brown sugar and almond, from a church-society book that assumed you knew what "flour to stiffen" meant. The proportions are unusual and worth reading carefully before you start.
- Flour to stiffenExpect roughly 4 to 4 1/2 cups for a dough firm enough to roll thin, added a cup at a time until it stops sticking. Stop as soon as it holds together; the high sugar ratio makes it easy to overwork into something tough.
- Three cups of brown sugarThat is a very high sugar-to-fat ratio by modern standards, and the recipe as printed gives no sign of a missing line. Expect a dough that spreads and sets crisp rather than soft, and watch the edges.
- Butter and lard mixedHalf a cup total, split however you like. Lard gives tenderness and shortness, butter gives flavour; all butter also works.
- Top milkThe cream-rich layer that rose to the top of an unhomogenised bottle, richer than whole milk but well short of heavy cream. Half-and-half is the closest supermarket equivalent.
- Slade's cream tartar and cinnamonD. & L. Slade was a Boston spice and extract house; contributors to books like this routinely wrote down the brand they had on the shelf. Any cream of tartar and cinnamon will do.
- The leaveningOne teaspoon soda with one and a half teaspoons cream of tartar is a homemade single-acting baking powder, and it starts working the moment the milk goes in. Mix, chill, roll and bake without long delays or the lift is spent.
- Chill before rollingThe dough is soft and sugary straight from the bowl. An hour in the refrigerator makes "roll out thin" possible without flouring the board so heavily that the cookies turn dry.
- OvenNo temperature or time is given. For a thin rolled cookie, 375F for 8 to 10 minutes is a reasonable modern starting point; watch the edges, since brown sugar hides the colour change.
- Loaf sugar frostingLoaf sugar was hard refined sugar broken from a cone or block, chopped coarse rather than ground. Crushed sugar cubes or Swedish pearl sugar, chopped with the nuts, give the same crunchy topping; it is a sprinkle, not a poured icing.
- YieldA large batch: several dozen thin cookies, depending on how much flour goes in and how thin you roll. It halves cleanly if that is too many.
Rolled cookies stamped out with a cutter and finished with chopped sugar were a workhorse of American church and society cookbooks in the decades either side of 1900, when women's church groups were compiling books like this one to raise funds. The naming of Slade's cream of tartar and cinnamon is characteristic of the genre: contributors wrote down the brand on the tin in their own kitchen. Almond extract with ground almonds, and almond with cinnamon, read as festive rather than everyday in these collections. Loaf sugar, called for in the topping, was already on its way out by this date; granulated sugar had largely displaced the old hard cone, so a cook chopping it was using up what she had or buying it for exactly this kind of sparkle.