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Chocolate Cookies
1/2 cup butter. 1 cup sugar. 1 egg. 1/4 teaspoon salt. 2 ozs. unsweetened chocolate 2 1/2 cups flour (scant) 2 teaspoons baking powder. 1/4 cup milk Cream the butter, add sugar gradually, egg well beaten, salt, and chocolate melted. Beat well, and add flour mixed and sifted with baking powder alternately with milk. Chill, roll very thin, then shape with a small cutter, first dipped in flour, and bake in a moderate oven. 2 eggs
A rolled chocolate cookie from the era before cocoa powder was standard in baking; the dough is a stiff creamed batter meant to be chilled hard and rolled paper-thin.
- Chilling is the hingeThe dough is soft when mixed and cannot be rolled thin until it is thoroughly cold. Give it at least an hour in the refrigerator, and work with a portion at a time, keeping the rest chilled.
- Moderate ovenRead that as 350F. Cookies rolled this thin bake in 6 to 9 minutes; pull them when the edges are set, since chocolate dough gives little visual warning before it burns.
- Unsweetened chocolateTwo ounces means two squares of baking chocolate, melted over hot water and cooled slightly before it goes into the creamed mixture. Cocoa powder is not a direct substitute here, as it carries far less fat than the block chocolate.
- Flour by feelThe instruction to keep the flour scant matters more than the exact cup count. Add just enough that the chilled dough rolls without cracking or sticking; too much makes a dry, chalky cookie.
- Alternating additionsAdd the dry mixture and the milk in turns, beginning and ending with flour, as the recipe directs, so the creamed mixture does not separate.
- Flouring the cutterDip the cutter in flour before each cut. Chocolate dough is tacky and a dry cutter drags the edges out of shape.
Rolled and cut cookies of this kind were a common sweet biscuit of the American home kitchen in the late nineteenth century. Block chocolate for cooking was sold in New England from the eighteenth century onward -- Baker's was being made at Dorchester, Massachusetts, from 1765 -- but it was long treated chiefly as a drink and a confection rather than a baking ingredient. The style of the instructions matches the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book of Fannie Farmer, which ran through many editions from 1896, and belongs to the moment when chemical leavening and measured cup-and-spoon quantities let a cook expect the same result twice.