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Sugar Cookies (Cup butter cups sugar eggs)
1 cup butter 2 cups sugar 2 eggs 5 cups flour or less 1 tsp. soda 2 tbsp. milk little nutmeg
— Mrs. John Legg
A bare ingredient list of the kind that filled church cookbooks, written for cooks who already knew what a rolled sugar cookie should feel like. The method and the oven are left entirely to you.
- The hinge: flour to feel, not to measure"5 cups flour or less" is the whole instruction that matters. Add flour only until the dough just stops sticking to the board; a stiff, over-floured dough bakes hard and dry. Start at four cups and work up.
- Method, since none is givenCream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, then add the flour sifted with the soda alternately with the milk. Chill the dough an hour before rolling — it is soft and warm from creaming, and cold dough cuts cleanly.
- OvenNo temperature is given, as is usual in a contributor's ingredient list of this kind. Rolled sugar cookies of this type will take roughly 375°F, 8 to 10 minutes, until the edges are just colored.
- Soda without acidThere is no sour milk, molasses or cream of tartar here to react with the teaspoon of soda; heat alone decomposes some of it, but the lift is modest and its main effects are browning and spread. An equal amount of baking powder would likely give a puffier, paler cookie if that is what you want.
- Butter and saltButter of the period was commonly salted for keeping. Use salted butter, or add a scant half teaspoon of salt — the list includes none.
- Nutmeg"Little nutmeg" means grated whole nutmeg, roughly a quarter to a half teaspoon. Pre-ground nutmeg loses its volatile oils quickly; grate it fresh and the difference is obvious in a plain cookie like this.
- YieldAbout five to six dozen cookies rolled a quarter-inch thick and cut with a two-and-a-half-inch cutter. Church cookbook quantities assume a crowd; the dough halves without trouble.
The Philathea cookbooks were compiled by Philathea classes — the young women's Bible-study groups organized alongside the Baraca movement for young men, Baraca dating from 1890 and Philathea from 1893, with both spreading widely in the early twentieth century — and sold to raise money for the class or the church. That origin explains the form of this recipe: each contributor gave what she carried in her head, signed her married name, and assumed every reader knew how to roll and cut a cookie. Sugar cookies were a common contribution, cheap in everything but butter, keeping well in a tin, and scaling easily for socials and suppers. The nutmeg was imported and shelf-stable long before vanilla extract became a kitchen staple.