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Calumet Nut Cookies (Level teaspoon Calumet Baking)
1/3 cup butter 1/2 cup sugar 2 eggs 1/2 cup flour 1 level teaspoon Calumet Baking Powder 3/4 cup chopped nuts 1 teaspoon lemon juice Cream butter and add sugar and eggs well beaten. Sift flour and baking powder together. Add first mixture; then add nuts and lemon juice and enough milk to make a soft dough. Drop from a spoon on an unbuttered baking sheet, leaving an inch space between them. Sprinkle with chopped nuts and bake in a very slow oven. This will make two dozen cookies. (See illustration, page 22.) 2 cups sugar 1 cup butter 3 eggs 3 tablespoons water
A promotional-booklet cookie whose ingredient list has been scrambled in printing: the quantities appear both before and after the method, and the flour is missing entirely. Read it as a drop cookie built on a very rich creamed base.
- The missing flourNo flour quantity is given anywhere on the page, though the method says to sift it with the baking powder. With 2 cups sugar, 1 cup butter and 3 eggs, a soft drop dough of this type would take somewhere in the region of 3 to 4 cups, but the original does not say and we will not invent a figure.
- Milk or waterThe ingredient list ends with 3 tablespoons water while the method calls for "enough milk to make a soft dough." Whether these are two versions of the same step or two separate additions cannot be told from the garbled page; use one liquid, added a spoonful at a time, and stop when the dough will just drop from a spoon.
- A very slow ovenIn period ranges roughly 250-275F. Bake until the cookies are set and the edges barely coloured; at so low a heat this will take considerably longer than a modern cookie, so watch them rather than trust a clock.
- Unbuttered sheetThe original is explicit about it, and with a cup of butter to the batch the cookies should release without greasing. Parchment is the modern equivalent and does no harm.
- One level teaspoonCalumet was a double-acting powder (calcium acid phosphate with sodium aluminium sulphate), and the booklet's recipes consistently specify level measures. A modern double-acting powder can be substituted one for one.
- NutsThree-quarters of a cup chopped, in the dough, plus more sprinkled on top before baking. Walnuts, pecans or hickory nuts all suit a period cookie of this kind.
- YieldTwo dozen, per the original, which makes these large cookies for the amount of batter involved. An inch between them is tight for a soft dough; two inches is safer.
Reliable Recipes was not a cookbook in the ordinary sense but an advertising booklet issued by the Calumet Baking Powder Company of Chicago, which built its business in the 1890s and after on a double-acting phosphate powder sold cheaper than the older cream-of-tartar brands. Booklets like this one were given away with tins or mailed on request, and the recipes in them tend to name the product by brand, usually with the words "level teaspoon" attached: the company's central claim was that its powder went further, and a page full of level measures made the argument better than any slogan. The cross-reference to an illustration on page 22 is another mark of the genre, at a time when few household cookbooks carried pictures at all. The garbled ingredient list here, with the quantities split across the method, may owe something to the column layout or to later transcription.