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Olympic Luncheon Dishes (Cookies cups Olympic Flour cup)
Cookies cups Olympic Flour cup shortening 11/½ cups sugar 1/2 cup milk 3 eggs 1 teaspoon each of salt, grated nutmeg and vanilla 21/½ teaspoons baking powder Cream shortening and sugar; add well beaten eggs and milk. Sift together dry ingredients and beat gradually into mixture and add vanilla. Roll thin, cut with cooky cutter, sprinkle with sugar and bake in quick oven.
A plain rolled sugar cookie of the branded-flour-pamphlet era, flavored with nutmeg and vanilla and finished with a sugar sprinkle rather than icing. A few of the quantities need judgment before you start.
- Missing quantitiesThe amounts of flour and shortening are not stated in the text as printed, and the sugar and baking powder figures are written ambiguously (read them as 1 1/2 cups sugar and 2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder). A workable reconstruction for a dough of this style with 3 eggs and 1/2 cup milk is about 1 cup shortening and 4-5 cups flour, added until the dough is stiff enough to roll.
- Olympic FlourA Pacific Northwest mill brand of the early twentieth century, probably milled from regional soft white wheat. Modern all-purpose flour substitutes directly; measure by spooning into the cup and leveling, since scooped flour can add close to an extra ounce per cup and toughen the dough.
- ShorteningIn this period the word covered lard, butter, or the new hydrogenated vegetable fats interchangeably. Butter gives the best flavor here; a half-and-half mix of butter and vegetable shortening holds the cut shapes with less spread.
- Quick ovenRoughly 400-425F. Thin rolled cookies at that heat need only 6 to 8 minutes, and they go from pale to scorched quickly, so watch the edges rather than the clock.
- Chill before rollingThe recipe rolls the dough straight from the bowl. With 1/2 cup milk in it the dough is slack; an hour in the refrigerator makes it far easier to roll thin and cut cleanly.
- NutmegA full teaspoon of grated nutmeg is assertive by current standards but characteristic of the period. Grate it fresh; pre-ground nutmeg loses most of its point within a few months.
- YieldDepending on cutter size, expect roughly five to six dozen thin cookies. They keep about a week in a tin and freeze well as raw cut shapes.
Cookbooks like this one were advertising in disguise: a flour mill printed a small collection of recipes and named its own brand in every ingredient list, which is why the flour here is not just flour but Olympic Flour. Rolled sugar cookies were the standard test of such a book, being the recipe most directly able to demonstrate whether a flour rolled and browned well. The heavy hand with nutmeg is worth noting: whole nutmegs were a long-keeping pantry staple, grated fresh as needed. The finish of plain sugar sprinkled over the raw dough, rather than icing, was the ordinary everyday treatment; decorated cookies belonged to holidays.