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Filled Cookies
1/2 cup shortening 1 cup sugar 1 egg 1/2 cup milk 3½ cups flour 3 level tsp. Royal B. P. 1 tsp. salt 1 tsp. vanilla Cream shortening, add sugar, egg, milk, flour sifted with salt and baking powder. Roll out and cut. Place filling on one-half of cookie and place other half on half and bake. 1/2 cup sugar 1 tbsp. flour 1/2 cup boiling water FILLING Cook all together until thick. 1/2 cup nuts 1 cup raisins
— Mrs. Joseph Legg
A standard rolled sugar cookie sandwiching a cooked raisin filling, written in the shorthand of a church cookbook that assumes the reader has made cookies before. Two things are missing entirely: the oven temperature and the order in which the filling ingredients go together.
- Oven temperature and timeNone is given. Cookies of this type are usually baked at around 375F for 10 to 12 minutes, until the edges are set and just colouring. The tops stay pale.
- Royal B. P.Royal Baking Powder, a brand rather than a type. Any modern double-acting baking powder works at the same 3 level teaspoons for 3 1/2 cups flour.
- ShorteningIn this period the word covers lard, a lard-and-butter mix, or the newer hydrogenated vegetable shortening. Butter gives more flavour and a slightly softer cookie; solid vegetable shortening gives the cleaner cut edges the recipe assumes.
- Making the fillingThe instruction "cook all together until thick" reads as though the nuts and raisins go in from the start. Cook the sugar, flour and boiling water to a thick paste first, then stir in the chopped raisins and nuts off the heat. Chop the raisins rather than leaving them whole or the cookies will not seal.
- Cool the filling completelyThis is the hinge. Warm filling melts the fat in the dough, the rounds tear as you lift them, and the filling boils out at the seam. Make the filling first and let it come to room temperature while the dough chills.
- Chill and roll thinAn hour in the refrigerator makes the dough easier to handle. Roll about 1/8 inch and cut 2 1/2 inch rounds; a teaspoon of filling on one round, a second round on top, edges pressed with a fork or the fingertips.
- Flour quantity3 1/2 cups is a guide rather than a rule. Add the last half cup only as needed to get a dough that rolls without sticking.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; a batch this size makes several dozen filled cookies at 2 1/2 inches, fewer if you cut larger. They keep well for several days in a tin and soften slightly as the filling moisture migrates into the dough.
Filled cookies of this shape -- "filled raisin cookies," "date pillows" -- appear regularly in North American community cookbooks from the late nineteenth century into the mid twentieth, dried fruit being an inexpensive filling a farm or town kitchen was likely to have on hand. The Philathea name belongs to the Philathea class movement, a network of young women's Bible study classes associated with the Baraca Sunday school work founded in the 1890s; classes across the United States and Canada published fundraising cookbooks made up of members' contributed recipes, each signed as this one is by Mrs. Joseph Legg. The instructions are correspondingly compressed: a contributor was writing for neighbours who already knew what a rolled cookie dough looked like, so the proportions worth arguing over are set down and everything assumed is left out. The brand name in the ingredient list is characteristic too -- Royal was among the heaviest advertisers of the period.