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Hard Cookies or Sweet Crackers
To cut in fancy shapes. They do not spread or lose form. 12 ounces of powdered sugar. 6 ounces of butter. 6 eggs. Half cupful of milk. 1 teaspoonful of baking powder. 2 pounds of flour. Lemon or cinnamon extract to flavor.
A stiff rolled dough of the kind bakeshops kept on hand for cut-out work: sturdy, sweet, and dry enough to hold a sharp edge. The original assumes a professional who knows his oven, so the temperature, time and yield all have to be supplied.
- "Powdered sugar" means fine granulatedIn American bakery books of this period powdered sugar is sugar ground finer than granulated, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Use ordinary granulated, or pulse it briefly in a food processor; modern 10X will make the dough soft and pasty.
- Weigh the flourTwo pounds is about 7 cups, and cup measurement at that scale will drift by several ounces. The whole point of the recipe is a dough that holds its shape, and that depends on the flour-to-fat ratio being right.
- The dough is meant to be very stiffSix eggs and half a cup of milk against two pounds of flour gives a firm, dry paste. Bring it together with your hands rather than beating it; if it will not cohere, add milk a teaspoon at a time and no more.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Bake at 350F, on the middle rack, until the edges are just coloured — roughly 8 to 12 minutes depending on thickness. These are supposed to be pale and hard, not browned.
- Flavouring quantity"Lemon or cinnamon extract to flavor" leaves the amount to the cook; 2 teaspoons of extract, or the grated zest of two lemons, is a reasonable starting point for a batch this size. Cinnamon extract is now uncommon; ground cinnamon worked into the flour is the usual substitute, though it is not the same thing.
- Baking powderOne teaspoon in two pounds of flour is a token amount, there for a slight lift rather than spread. Do not increase it — more will puff the cookies and blur the cut edges, which defeats the recipe.
- Roll thin and chillRoll to about 1/8 inch, cut, then rest the cut shapes in the refrigerator for 15 minutes before baking. Cold dough keeps the fancy outlines crisp.
- Yield and keepingYield depends entirely on the cutter; at 1/8 inch a batch this size runs to many dozens, and it halves cleanly. They harden further as they cool and will keep for weeks in a tin, which is what "hard cookies" is describing.
The name gives away the category rather than the flavour: hard cookies were the keeping cookies, made dry and dense so that they could be cut into shapes well in advance without any loss of shape. American pastry manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries leave a great deal unsaid ame ooven — the reader was assumed to know his own oven and to be working through a batch this size in a morning. The line between this dough and the German Zuckerplätzchen tradition brought over by immigrant bakers is thin; the lemon-or-cinnamon choice and the cut-out shapes both point that way, though the recipe itself makes no such claim. Sweet crackers, the alternate name, reflects an older and looser use of "cracker" for any hard, dry baked good rather than specifically a savoury one.