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Peanut Cookies
2 tablespoons butter 1/4 cup sugar 1 egg 1 teaspoon baking powder ¼ teaspoon salt ½ cup flour 2 teaspoons milk ½ cup finely chopped peanuts 1/2 teaspoon lemon juice Cream the butter, add sugar, and egg well beaten. Mix and sift baking powder, salt, and flour; add to first mixture; then add milk, peanuts, and lemon juice. Drop from a teaspoon on a buttered sheet one inch apart, and place onehalf peanut on top of each. Bake twelve to fifteen minutes in a slow oven . This recipe will make twenty-four cookies.
One pint peanuts when shelled should yield one-half cup.
A small-batch drop cookie from an era when peanuts were still a novelty in baking. The quantities are tiny by modern standards and the dough is more batter than dough.
- On the saltThe salt is a quarter teaspoon, as the printed page has it. Use unsalted butter and unsalted peanuts or the cookies turn savoury.
- A slow ovenThat means 300-325F. These are meant to dry and colour gently rather than spread and brown; at 350F the edges will darken before the centres set.
- The peanut measureWeigh if you can: about 2 to 2.5 oz of chopped shelled peanuts makes the half cup the recipe calls for.
- Use roasted, not rawPeanuts sold shelled and raw will taste green and chalky after only twelve minutes at a low temperature. Roasted, skinned, unsalted peanuts give the flavour the recipe assumes.
- Why the lemon juiceHalf a teaspoon is far too little to react meaningfully with the baking powder at this scale; the likeliest purpose is simply to cut the richness of the nuts.
- SpacingOne inch apart is optimistic for a batter this loose. Give them two inches on parchment; a buttered sheet works but encourages spreading.
- Yield and sizeTwenty-four cookies from half a cup of flour means teaspoon-sized rounds, small and thin.
- DonenessTwelve to fifteen minutes at a low temperature leaves them pale. Pull them when the edges are set and just tinged; they crisp as they cool on the sheet.
Peanuts moved from Southern field crop and street-vendor snack into Northern middle-class kitchens over the second half of the nineteenth century, and by the turn of the century they had become the sort of ingredient a cooking school could treat as respectable rather than rustic. Recipes like this one, alongside peanut sandwiches and peanut soups, appear in the era when peanut butter itself was newly commercial and the nut was being promoted as a cheap source of protein. The instruction that a pint of unshelled peanuts yields half a cup shelled is a small window into the period: peanuts were bought in the shell, by volume, and the cook did the work.