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Cream Cookies
1/2 cup thin cream. 1 teaspoon salt. 2 teaspoons baking powder ½ teaspoon salt 2 teaspoons yellow ginger Flour to roll Mix and bake same as Vanilla Wafers. ½ cup butter 1 cup sugar 2 eggs 1 tablespoon milk
The ingredient list has been scrambled in the original printing — the fat, sugar, eggs and milk appear after the instruction line — and the method is borrowed wholesale from the Vanilla Wafers recipe that precedes it. Read it as: cream ½ cup butter, add 1 cup sugar gradually, then 2 beaten eggs, 1 tablespoon milk, and the dry ingredients with just enough flour to make a dough stiff enough to roll.
- The hinge: roll thin and watch themThese are wafers, not soft drop cookies. Roll to about 1/8 inch, cut, and bake only until the edges color — 6 to 9 minutes. A minute past that and the sugar-heavy dough turns hard rather than crisp.
- "Flour to roll"Expect roughly 1¾ to 2¼ cups, added a little at a time. The original leaves the amount to the cook's judgement, as such rolled-dough recipes usually did; stop as soon as the dough holds together without sticking, since extra flour is what makes these tough.
- Oven temperatureThe original sends you to the Vanilla Wafers recipe for the baking; for these, 350–375°F works. Use the lower end if your baking sheets are dark or thin.
- "Yellow ginger"Read it as ordinary dried ground ginger. The qualifier probably pointed to a grade or colour of rhizome in the period spice trade — pale gingers were sold as the finer sort — but the exact distinction the author had in mind is not certain. Any supermarket ground ginger will do.
- The saltOne full teaspoon reads high against ½ cup butter. With modern salted butter, ½ teaspoon is closer to the intended balance.
- Chill before rollingNot in the original, but 30 minutes in the refrigerator makes a butter-and-egg dough this soft far easier to roll thin without extra flour.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons is a lot by modern habit but works as written; period powders were single-acting, so mix and get the sheets into the oven promptly.
- YieldAbout four dozen 2-inch wafers, depending on how thin you roll. They keep a week in a tin and stale quickly in humid air.
The name is a small puzzle: there is no cream in the list, and the cookies are unmistakably gingered. Its placement immediately after Vanilla Wafers, and its borrowing of that recipe's method, shows how such books were built: a base formula, then a run of variations distinguished by one or two ingredients, with the reader expected to look up the page before. That economy of print is also why this entry arrived garbled, its ingredient list broken across the instruction. Ginger cookies of this rolled, crisp, keep-in-a-tin sort were staple household baking in the period, ginger being one of the few spices cheap and shelf-stable enough for everyday use.