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Eggless Cookies
1 cup of sugar, 1 cup of honey, 1 cup of milk, 1 cup of butter, ½ teaspoon of nutmeg, , 1 cup of butter, 1/2 teaspoon of nutmeg, 1½ teaspoon of soda and flour to roll.
— Mrs. Barber's Honey-Cookies
1 large teacupful of honey. 1 egg broken into the cup the honey was measured in, then 2 large spoonfuls sour milk and fill the cup with butter or good beef dripping. Put in 1 teaspoonful of soda and flour to make a soft dough . Bake in a moderate oven a light brown
Two honey cookie recipes have run together on this page, and the first has picked up a duplicated line of text. Both are of the old "flour to roll" school, where the cook judged the dough by feel rather than by measure.
- The duplicated lineIn the first recipe, "1 cup of butter, ½ teaspoon of nutmeg" appears twice — a typesetting repeat, not a second addition. Use one cup of butter and half a teaspoon of nutmeg in total.
- Flour to rollNeither recipe gives a flour quantity. With a cup each of sugar, honey, milk and butter, expect somewhere in the range of 5 to 6 cups, added until the dough is stiff enough to roll at about ¼ inch without sticking. Chilling the dough an hour first makes it far easier to handle.
- A large teacupfulThe Victorian teacup used as a measure is usually reckoned at about ¾ of a modern cup, though usage varied and "large" pushes it toward a full cup. In the second recipe the egg, sour milk and butter all go into the same cup, so the amount of fat adjusts itself to whatever cup you use; the egg, the soda and the two spoonfuls of milk are fixed, so the proportions shift somewhat with cup size.
- Soda and sour acidThe first recipe's 1½ teaspoons of soda has only honey for acid — sweet milk will not activate it fully, and the excess reads soapy. Souring the milk with a tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice, as the second recipe assumes, gives a cleaner lift. The second recipe's single teaspoon with two spoonfuls of sour milk is better balanced.
- Beef drippingRendered beef fat was a common thrifty substitute for butter and gives a firm, savoury-edged cookie. Note that it is nearly pure fat, where butter carries water and milk solids, so a dripping dough is shorter and slightly drier. Modern cooks will find butter, or half butter and half lard, closer to expectation.
- A moderate ovenRoughly 350-375F. Honey doughs brown faster than plain sugar doughs because of the fructose, so check at 8 minutes; "a light brown" means the edges only, not the whole surface.
- YieldThe first recipe makes a large batch — roughly five to six dozen 2-inch cookies. The second, built on one teacupful, gives about two dozen. Both keep well in a tin and soften over a few days, which was the point of using honey.
Honey cookies belong to a long tradition of keeping cakes — honey is hygroscopic, so the cookies stay soft in the jar for weeks rather than going to stone the way a plain sugar biscuit does. The second recipe is a good example of the contributed-recipe form: credited to Mrs. Barber, measured entirely in whatever teacup was to hand, and passing along a trick — break the egg into the honey cup, then fill it with fat — that saves both a dish and any need for scales. "Flour to make a soft dough" assumed a reader who had made the dough before, or who had someone nearby who had.