Home › Recipes › Cookies, Common
Cookies, Common
1 pound of sugar. 8 ounces of butter. 6 eggs. 1 cupful of milk. 4 teaspoonfuls of baking powder. 2 pounds of flour.
This is a bakery formula rather than a domestic recipe: proportions by weight, no method, no oven, no yield. Anyone who worked the bench in 1890 would have known what to do with it, so the working notes below fill in what the page assumes.
- Method the formula assumesCream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs one at a time, add the milk, then work in the flour sifted with the baking powder. The dough is meant to be stiff enough to roll and cut, not dropped.
- Weights to volumes1 lb sugar is about 2 1/4 cups; 8 oz butter is two sticks; 2 lb flour is roughly 7 cups scooped and levelled. Hold back the last half pound of flour and add it only until the dough stops sticking, since modern flour may absorb differently from the flour this formula was written for.
- A cupfulA cupful in books of this kind is usually a half-pint, 8 fluid ounces, though cup measures of the period were not fully standardised. Eggs then may have run smaller than today's large eggs, in which case five large eggs is the closer match.
- OvenThe formula gives no oven instruction. For rolled cookies of this kind, 375-400F for 8-10 minutes, until the edges just colour.
- Rolling and cuttingRoll about 1/4 inch thick on a lightly floured bench and cut with a plain or scalloped round. Chilling the dough an hour first makes it easier to handle.
- Baking powderFour teaspoons to two pounds of flour is modest by modern standards. Late-nineteenth-century powders varied in strength and many were alum-based; with modern double-acting powder three teaspoons should be enough.
- YieldThis is a shop batch. Expect eight to ten dozen 2 1/2-inch cookies. Quartering the formula gives a household quantity and divides cleanly: 4 oz sugar, 2 oz butter, 1 1/2 eggs (beat two and use most), 1/4 cup milk, 1 tsp baking powder, 8 oz flour.
- FlavouringThe formula is bare. Nutmeg, lemon zest and caraway were common flavourings for plain cookies of this period, as was a wash of milk and sugar on top; a teaspoon of vanilla or half a nutmeg grated can be added without upsetting the balance.
Here "common" means the plain everyday sort, as against fancy goods that carried icing, jam or nuts. The word cookie itself is generally traced to the Dutch koekje, little cake, carried into American English through New York. The form the entry takes -- pounds of sugar and flour rather than cupfuls, no oven instruction, no yield -- suggests it was written for someone who scaled ingredients on a balance and judged the oven by hand.