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Marble Cookies
3/4 cup butter 2 eggs, beaten separately Pinch of salt 1/4 cup milk 3 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder 1 cup sugar Mix as for cake then separate dough, putting half in another bowl, and to one-half add rind of 1 orange and juice of half an orange; to other half add 2 ounces of melted chocolate. Save 1/4 cup of flour in sifter to add to white dough after orange juice has been added. Place dark dough on top of light dough and roll together very thin, and cut and bake in a quick oven.
A rolled marble cookie from a baking-powder company booklet, written in the compressed style of its era: the flour quantity is never stated, and "mix as for cake" stands in for the whole method. A few things need pinning down before you start.
- The missing flourThe ingredient list gives no flour at all, yet the method tells you to hold back 1/4 cup of it in the sifter. This is a genuine gap in the original, not a conversion problem. A rolled cookie dough on 3/4 cup butter, 1 cup sugar, 2 eggs and 1/4 cup milk generally takes somewhere near 3 to 3 1/2 cups of flour; you will have to judge it by feel, adding until the dough is firm enough to roll thin without sticking.
- "Mix as for cake"That means cream the butter and sugar, beat in the yolks, then add the sifted flour, baking powder and salt alternately with the milk, and fold in the stiffly beaten whites last. "Beaten separately" in the ingredient list refers to yolks and whites, not to two eggs beaten one at a time.
- A quick ovenGenerally reckoned at about 400-425F. Thin rolled cookies at that heat are done in six to eight minutes, and the chocolate half will scorch before it looks done, so watch the edges rather than the clock.
- Calumet baking powderCalumet was an alum-phosphate powder, broadly comparable in strength to a modern double-acting powder, so 3 level teaspoons of a modern double-acting powder is a reasonable substitution.
- Why the flour is held backThe orange juice adds liquid to the light half only. The reserved 1/4 cup brings it back to the same stiffness as the chocolate half, which matters because two doughs of different consistency will not roll together evenly.
- The chocolateTwo ounces of melted chocolate here almost certainly means unsweetened baking chocolate, the usual sense of unqualified 'chocolate' in American recipes of this period. Semi-sweet will make that half noticeably sweeter and softer.
- Rolling the marbleStack the dark sheet on the light, roll them together thin, then cut. The marbling comes from the two layers stretching and smearing into each other, so roll in different directions rather than back and forth in one line. Chill the stacked doughs briefly if the butter softens.
- YieldRoughly four to five dozen cookies at about 2 inches, depending on how thin you roll and how much flour the dough takes.
Reliable Recipes was not a cookbook in the ordinary commercial sense but a premium booklet issued by the Calumet Baking Powder Company of Chicago, which is why the brand name appears inside the ingredient list rather than as a generic measure. Calumet, founded in the 1880s, competed in a crowded market of chemical leaveners and gave away recipe collections as advertising. The telegraphic style, and lapses like the unstated flour, suggest these were reminders for people who already knew how to make a cake rather than instructions for beginners. Marbled doughs, orange-and-chocolate among them, appear in American home baking from the late nineteenth century onward, once reliable chemical leavening and cheap block chocolate made two-tone cakes and cookies easier to attempt at home.