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Sugar Cookies (Cup of sugar cup butter)
1 cup of sugar, 1/2 cup butter (creamed together), 1 egg well beaten, 1/2 cup sour cream, 1 level tsp. of soda dissolved in the cream, 1 tsp. vanilla, little salt. Mix as soft as can be handled, do not roll very thin, sprinkle a little sugar over top, and bake in a moderate oven.
— Mrs. E. Knight
A rolled sour-cream cookie of the kind that fills community cookbooks from the early 1900s. The flour is left to the cook's judgment, which is the one thing you have to solve before you start.
- The unstated flourNo quantity is given because the cook was expected to add flour until the dough was "as soft as can be handled." For this proportion of fat, sugar and liquid that generally lands around 2 to 2 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour. Add it gradually and stop early; a stiff dough here bakes hard rather than tender.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350-375F. On a light-colored sheet the cookies want roughly 8 to 10 minutes, until the edges are just set and barely colored.
- Sour creamPeriod sour cream was thick, cultured and tart, closer to modern full-fat sour cream than to anything labeled light. It supplies the acid that the soda needs, so do not substitute sweet cream or the cookies will taste soapy and stay pale.
- Dissolving the soda in the creamThis is deliberate, not fussiness. Stirring the level teaspoon into the cream distributes it evenly and starts the reaction just before the flour goes in, so mix and get the dough onto the sheet without long delays.
- Do not roll thinAbout 1/4 inch is right. Thin sour-cream cookies dry out and lose the soft, cakey crumb that is the point of the type; the instruction is the hinge of the recipe.
- Sugaring the topsSprinkle the sugar after cutting, then press it lightly with the rolling pin or your palm so it adheres through baking. Coarse or granulated both work.
- "Little salt"Read as about 1/4 teaspoon, and add a further pinch if you are using unsalted butter; butter of the period was commonly salted.
- YieldRoughly three dozen cookies from a 2 1/2-inch cutter. They keep two or three days in a tin and stale faster than a butter-and-egg cookie, being softer.
Sour-cream cookies belong to the era when a household with a cow or a milk delivery always had cream on the turn, and soda was the standard way to put it to use. The Philathea Cook Book, like hundreds of church and class cookbooks compiled in the United States and Canada in the first decades of the twentieth century, was assembled from members' own handwriting, and the flour quantity is simply absent. The Philathea classes were adult Bible-study groups for young women, the female counterpart to the Baraca movement, and their cookbooks were sold to raise money for class work. Recipes of this sort — one cup sugar, half a cup butter, one egg, half a cup of sour milk or cream — recur with small variations across the whole genre, and the title given here, quoting the opening measurements, is an editorial convenience rather than anything found in the original.