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Nut Cookies
Yolks 2 eggs. 1 cup brown sugar. 1 cup chopped nut meats. Whites 2 eggs 6 tablespoons flour Few grains salt Beat yolks of eggs until thick and lemon-colored, add sugar gradually, nut meats, whites of egg beaten until stiff, and flour mixed with salt. Drop from tip of spoon on buttered sheet, spread, and bake in a moderate oven.
The text as printed is missing part of its ingredient list — the yolks, sugar and nut meats are all called for in the method but only the whites, flour and salt survive in the column. Treat the amounts below as the shape of the recipe rather than a transcription.
- The missing quantitiesThe method uses 2 egg yolks, sugar and nut meats that never made it into the printed list. Comparable drop cookies of the period tend to use something on the order of half a cup of sugar and a similar volume of nuts to two eggs, though that is an inference and not a reading of this text. This is a genuine gap in the original, not a conversion problem.
- Moderate ovenConventionally read as somewhere around 350-375F; the original gives no temperature. These bake thin, so start checking early — they go from pale gold to scorched at the edges quickly.
- Six tablespoons flourThat is 3/8 cup, a notably small amount. The batter is closer to a sponge than a dough; the beaten whites and the eggs do most of the structural work.
- Buttered sheetButter alone on a bare tin will let a batter this lean weld itself down. Parchment is the practical substitute, and it also makes the "spread" step easier to control.
- SpreadThe instruction matters more than it looks. Each spoonful should be pushed out to a thin round with the back of a spoon or an offset spatula; unspread, they bake into small domes that stay damp in the middle.
- Folding orderFlour goes in last, after the whites, and should be folded rather than stirred. Beating at this stage knocks out the air and the cookies bake flat and tough.
- Nut meatsThe original does not say which nut or how finely cut. Hickory, walnut and almond were all common choices in books of the period. Large chunks will tear a batter this thin as it spreads.
- YieldThe original gives no yield; two eggs' worth of this batter should give roughly two dozen small cookies. Lift them off while still warm — cooled fully on the sheet, they stick.
Nut cookies belong to a family of very lean egg-and-sugar drop cakes that fill the wafer end of this chapter, close cousins to the almond macaroon and to the "kisses" of the same period. The distinguishing move is separating the eggs and folding the whites back in, which is the same technique as a sponge cake done at cookie scale, and it produces the crisp shell and slightly chewy interior that a creamed-butter dough cannot. Nut meats were a cheap and abundant flavouring in late nineteenth-century New England kitchens — hickory nuts, butternuts and black walnuts were often gathered rather than bought — which is why so many books of the period give nut cookies, nut cake and nut bread without ever specifying which nut. The truncated ingredient list here is a reminder that these books were typeset at speed and reprinted often.