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Calumet Sugar Cookies
3 eggs 3 tablespoons water 1 teaspoon Calumet Baking Powder 1 teaspoon nutmeg 1/2 teaspoon cloves 3 cups flour Cream butter and sugar, beat in whipped eggs, add baking powder and 1 cup flour, then water and spices, add remaining flour gradually, working in more flour until dough is stiff enough to roll. Sprinkle flour over pastry board. Make a ball of dough, and lay it on the board. Rub rolling pin with flour and roll out dough into a sheet 1/4-inch thick. Cut in round cakes, sift granulated sugar over each, and bake quickly. (See illustration, page 22.) 3½ cups sifted pastry flour
A branded promotional cookie recipe from a baking powder company, printed with a fragmentary ingredient list. The method is complete; the quantities are not.
- The list is incompleteAs printed, the recipe names only baking powder, spices and flour, yet the method calls for butter, sugar, eggs and water. Those four quantities are genuinely missing from the text and cannot be recovered from it. A comparable rolled sugar cookie of the period runs about 1 cup butter, 1 1/2 cups sugar, 2 eggs and 2 to 4 tablespoons water for this much flour, but that is a reconstruction, not the book's figure.
- Two flour amountsThe body says 3 cups flour and a stray line at the end says 3 1/2 cups sifted pastry flour, a typesetting collision. Treat flour as variable: the instruction to work in "more flour until dough is stiff enough to roll" is the real measure.
- Pastry flourPastry flour is softer than modern all-purpose and gives a tenderer, more crumbly cookie. All-purpose works; substituting a portion of cake flour brings it closer to the original texture.
- "Bake quickly"The book gives no oven, only the instruction to bake quickly; in period terms that points to a hot oven, roughly 400 to 425F. For quarter-inch rolled cookies that means roughly 6 to 8 minutes, until the edges just colour. They set as they cool and go hard if left until the centres brown.
- Baking powder timingThe order given, creaming first and adding the powder with the first cup of flour, is fine, but whisk the powder into that flour rather than dumping it onto the butter so it disperses evenly.
- Rolling and chillingThe dough is stiffened with flour rather than cold, which is why the original keeps adding flour. Chilling the ball for 30 minutes instead lets you roll thin without working in enough extra flour to toughen the cookie.
- The sugar toppingSift granulated sugar over the cut rounds before baking, not after; it needs the oven heat to fuse to the surface. Do this on the sheet, since sugared dough sticks to the lifter.
- YieldWith about 3 1/2 cups flour and a 2 1/2-inch cutter, expect roughly four to five dozen cookies.
Reliable Recipes was published by the Calumet Baking Powder Company of Chicago, and like many manufacturer cookbooks of its era its purpose was to put the brand name inside the ingredient list, which is why the first line reads "1 teaspoon Calumet Baking Powder" rather than simply "baking powder." Calumet, said to take its name from the Calumet region south of Chicago, sold a double-acting powder that released gas once when wetted and again in the oven's heat, a formulation that suited a stiff rolled dough of this kind and helped it compete against the older cream-of-tartar powders. Spiced rolled sugar cookies of this type, heavy on nutmeg and clove and cut in plain rounds, were a standing item in American kitchens long before the pamphlet appeared; the company's contribution was not the cookie but the leavening.