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Dropped Peanut Cookies
2 tbsp. butter 1/4 cup sugar 1 egg 1/8 tsp. salt 1/2 cup flour 2 tbsp. milk 1 tsp. Royal bak. powder 1/2 cup chopped peanuts 1/2 tsp. vanilla or lemon Cream butter, add sugar, beaten egg; sift flour, salt, baking powder, and add milk, nuts and flavoring. Drop from teaspoon on cookie pan, one inch apart, and bake 12 minutes. Makes 2 doz. cookies.
— Mrs. Leon Felton
A small, plain drop cookie from a church-class fundraiser book, written for cooks who already knew how their own stove behaved. The only real gap is the oven temperature.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is specified. For a small drop cookie baked twelve minutes, a moderate to moderately hot oven, roughly 350-375F, is a reasonable modern guess. Bake until the edges are set and lightly browned; the centers stay soft.
- SpacingOne inch apart is tight for a dropped batter. Two inches is safer, since these will spread somewhat as they bake.
- Royal baking powderA brand name, not a special product. Any modern double-acting baking powder works at the same 1 teaspoon. Brand names turn up routinely in community cookbooks of this era, sometimes simply because that was the tin in the cupboard, and sometimes because manufacturers advertised in or helped fund the printing.
- The peanutsRoasted peanuts, chopped medium-fine, are what the recipe assumes. If you use salted cocktail peanuts, cut or drop the 1/8 teaspoon salt. Raw peanuts will taste flat and slightly green in a cookie baked only 12 minutes.
- Mixing orderThe instructions read oddly: sift the flour, salt and baking powder together, then add them to the creamed butter, sugar and egg, followed by the milk, with nuts and flavoring stirred in last. Do not beat once the flour is in.
- PanAn early-1900s "cookie pan" was a bare sheet, generally greased. Parchment or a silicone mat makes removal easier.
- YieldTwo dozen from this quantity means teaspoon-sized cookies about 1 1/2 inches across when baked. They are meant as small tea cookies, not as a substantial cookie; the batch is easily doubled.
Philathea cookbooks come out of the Baraca-Philathea movement, a network of adult Sunday-school classes that spread through American Protestant churches in the first decades of the twentieth century, with Baraca classes for young men and Philathea classes for young women. Selling a compiled cookbook of members' own recipes, each signed with the contributor's married name, was standard fundraising practice, and the signature mattered as much as the recipe: it was a small public claim on a dish. The peanuts are a period marker. Southern peanut acreage expanded sharply in the early 1900s as boll weevil damage pushed cotton growers toward other crops, and cheap roasted peanuts moved from the ballpark bag into home baking, showing up in cookies, brittle, and loaf breads in community collections of the 1910s and 1920s.