Home › Recipes › Cookies, Sugar Cakes. Best
Cookies, Sugar Cakes. Best
1 pound of sugar. 1 pound of butter. 12 eggs. 3 teaspoonfuls of baking powder. Flour to make soft dough--3 pounds.
Cream the butter and sugar together the same as for pound cake. Beat the eggs and mix them in, then the powder, add some flavoring, then flour. Let the dough, after it has been worked smooth, stand a few minutes before rolling it out. Sift sugar over the sheet of dough before cutting out the cakes.
This is a bakery-scale sugar cookie written for someone who works by the pound and already knows their oven. It scales down cleanly to a quarter batch, and the only real decision is how much of the three pounds of flour you actually need.
- Scale it downAs written this yields roughly eight to ten dozen cookies depending on cutter size. A quarter batch — 4 oz sugar, 4 oz butter, 3 eggs, 3/4 tsp baking powder, about 12 oz flour — fits a domestic mixer and two sheet pans.
- Flour is a target, not a measure"Flour to make soft dough--3 pounds" means add until the dough just holds together and is still soft. Start with two-thirds of it and work in the rest only as needed; you may well use less than the full three pounds.
- No oven temperature is givenThe original assumes a baker's judgement. A moderate oven, in the region of 350-375F for 8-10 minutes, suits cookies of this richness: bake until the edges are set and just colouring. They should not brown all over.
- Twelve eggs, and what they doThere is very little chemical leavening here relative to the flour — three teaspoons of baking powder to three pounds is barely a whisper. The eggs are the structure and most of the lift, so beat them well and add them gradually so the creamed butter does not break.
- The rest mattersLetting the worked dough stand relaxes the gluten and lets the flour hydrate, which stops the cut shapes from shrinking and toughening. The recipe says only "a few minutes"; ten to fifteen at room temperature is a reasonable reading. Chilling it makes the dough easier to roll but firmer to cut.
- Sugaring the sheetThe sugar goes onto the rolled dough before the cutter comes down, not onto the cut cakes afterwards, so it is pressed into the surface. The recipe says to sift it, which implies a fine sugar.
- Flavouring"Some flavoring" of this date could mean lemon extract, vanilla, or grated nutmeg. For a quarter batch, about a teaspoon of extract or half a teaspoon of grated nutmeg.
- ButterButter of the period was often salted. If you use unsalted butter at cool room temperature, add a scant half teaspoon of salt per pound of flour; the recipe calls for none at all.
The sugar cake or plain rolled cookie was the workhorse of the American bakeshop counter — cheap in ingredients, keeping well in a tin, and endlessly variable by changing the flavouring and the cutter. The word cookie itself is generally traced to the Dutch koekje, a little cake, carried into American English through New York. Notice too that baking powder is used casually here as an ordinary shop staple.