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Sand Tarts
1/2 cup butter 1 cup sugar 1 egg 1¾ cups flour. 1 cup sugar. 1 3/4 cups flour. 2 teaspoons baking powder White 1 egg Blanched almonds 1 tablespoon sugar 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon Cream the butter, add sugar gradually, and egg well beaten; then add flour mixed and sifted with baking powder. Chill, toss one-half mixture on a floured board, and roll one-eighth inch thick. Shape with a doughnut cutter. Brush over with white of egg, and sprinkle with sugar mixed with cinnamon. Split almonds, and arrange three halves on each at equal distances. Place on a buttered sheet, and bake eight minutes in a slow oven. ½ cup butter 1/2 cup sugar 2 eggs
The ingredient list in this edition has been scrambled and is missing at least one item, so read it against the method before you start.
- The flour is missingNo flour quantity is printed, though the method calls for it. A dough of 1/2 cup butter, 1/2 cup sugar and 2 eggs needs roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups of flour to roll at an eighth of an inch; add it gradually until the dough is stiff but not dry. This is a genuine gap in the text, not a conversion problem.
- Two sugars, two eggsThe 1/2 cup sugar and 2 eggs belong to the dough. The 1 tablespoon sugar with 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon is the topping, and the egg white listed at the top is the wash the method calls for.
- OvenThe book gives no temperatures; 'slow oven' is conventionally reckoned at somewhere around 300F, though period usage varies. Eight minutes at that heat is unlikely to colour a cookie this thin, so 325 to 350F is the safer reading -- pull them the moment the edges take colour; they should stay pale.
- Chill properlyThe instruction to chill is the hinge. This is a high-butter dough rolled to an eighth of an inch, and warm dough will tear and spread. Chill at least an hour, work with half at a time, and return the scraps to the refrigerator between rollings.
- Doughnut cutterA ring cutter, giving a cookie with a hole. Any 2 to 2 1/2 inch round cutter works; the three almond halves were arranged around the ring at equal spacing, and on a plain round they sit as a triangle.
- Blanched almondsBuy blanched whole almonds and split them along the natural seam with a paring knife, or use sliced almonds and lay three overlapping pieces. Unblanched almonds can be blanched by pouring boiling water over them and slipping the skins off.
- YieldRoughly four dozen cookies from the full dough at this thickness, depending on the cutter and on how much flour the dough takes. They keep well in a tin.
Sand tarts are a Pennsylvania German cookie, generally traced to the German Sandtorte tradition, and the name is often said to refer to texture rather than to any sand-coloured glaze, a reading tolerant of a dough this short and this thinly rolled, which breaks with a fine, crumbling, almost gritty fracture — though the cinnamon-sugar sprinkling has also been offered as the source. The rolled, cut, egg-washed and almond-studded cookie was for a long time associated with Christmas baking in eastern Pennsylvania. Its appearance in a Boston book shows how thoroughly regional German-American baking had entered the general American repertoire by the turn of the century, alongside the older English shortbreads and the chemically leavened cookies that were by then long established.