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Fourth Day: Cookies
No. 38-MOTHER'S COOKIES.
One cup butter, two of sugar, three well-beaten eggs, a quarter of a teaspoonful soda, half a nutmeg, small half-teaspoonful cloves or cinnamon.
No. 39-ELLEN'S COOKIES.
Three-quarters of a cup lard, the same of butter, one cup milk, one teaspoon soda, rind and half the juice of one lemon, just enough flour to roll it out with. Very rich.
No. 40-PLAIN COOKIES.
One pound flour, one-half do. sugar, six oz. butter, three eggs, one teaspoon soda, a little nutmeg or other spice. If richer cookies are desired take one-half pound butter.
No. 41-BRIDGET'S COOKIES.
Two cups sugar, one do. butter, one do. milk, two eggs, two even teaspoons soda, four of cream tartar; spice if you like it; enough flour to roll easily.
No. 42-POOR MAN'S CAKE.
Four rolled-cookie formulas of the shorthand kind, written for a cook who already knew what cookie dough should feel like. Two of them are missing ingredients that the reader was expected to supply from experience.
- "do." means dittoIn Nos. 40 and 41, "one-half do." and "one do." repeat the unit named just before. So No. 40 is one pound flour, half a pound sugar; No. 41 is two cups sugar, one cup butter, one cup milk.
- No. 38 has no flour and no liquidAs printed it is butter, sugar, eggs and spice. The flour is simply omitted, and the quantity is not recoverable with confidence — a dough of this proportion would want somewhere in the region of four to five cups, added until it rolls. Treat the recipe as a set of ratios, not a working formula.
- No. 39 has no sugarAs printed it is lard, butter, milk, soda and lemon with "just enough flour," which would make a biscuit rather than a cookie. Sugar appears to have been omitted, whether by the author or in setting; the surrounding recipes run to roughly one to two cups of sugar per cup of fat.
- Soda without an acidNos. 38 and 40 call for soda with no cream of tartar, no sour milk and no molasses; sweet milk and butter will not neutralise it, so the leavening is largely inert and any excess reads as a soapy, faintly metallic note. (No. 39 at least has the lemon juice to work against.) No. 41 is the sound one: two teaspoons soda to four of cream of tartar is a homemade baking powder of the period, at roughly the ratio still used.
- Half a nutmegA whole nutmeg grates to about two teaspoons, so half is a full teaspoon of freshly grated nutmeg — assertive but not wrong for these doughs.
- LardNo. 39's three-quarters cup lard would have been rendered pork fat, firmer and blander than the tub shortening sold now. Butter can stand in for it, though the cookies will spread more and brown faster.
- Rolling and thicknessNos. 39 and 41 direct the cook to add flour enough to roll the dough; no thickness is given, and about a quarter inch is a reasonable working figure. Thinner than that and the spice-heavy doughs scorch at the edge before the centre sets.
- OvenNo temperature or oven description is given anywhere in the group; a hot oven of around 400F for eight to ten minutes, until the edges just colour, is a reasonable modern equivalent.
- YieldNo. 40, the most complete of the four, makes roughly five to six dozen two-and-a-half-inch cookies.
Six Little Cooks is generally attributed to Elizabeth Stansbury Kirkland and appeared in Chicago in the late 1870s as a cooking class in story form, aimed at girls old enough to be trusted at the range. That framing explains the shape of these entries: they are transcriptions of what a household actually kept in its head, credited by the name of whoever supplied them — Mother, Ellen, Bridget — rather than standardised for print. The named cooks are worth noticing. Bridget was a stock name for Irish domestic servants in American households of the period, and Ellen is often taken the same way, though the evidence there is thinner; their recipes sitting beside Mother's invites the inference that a middle-class kitchen's knowledge was not all the mistress's own. The word cookie itself is traced to the Dutch koekje, a little cake, and was well established in American usage by the time this book was set; English cookbooks of the same decade would have called them small cakes or biscuits.<br><br>The chemistry here catches the trade mid-shift. Chemical leavening had displaced yeast and beaten eggs in the home baker's cookie dough, and although commercial baking powder was already widely marketed, a careful cook might still mix her own from soda and cream of tartar, as No. 41 does.</br></br>