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Bohemian Christmas Cookies
Yolks of 2 hard-cooked eggs
1 tablespoon milk
⅓ cup butter or shortening
Flour to stiffen for rolling
⅓ cup sugar
3 tablespoons finely chopped blanched almonds
Yolk of 1 egg
Put the hard-cooked yolks of eggs through a ricer or sieve and cream with the butter or shortening. Add the sugar, cream again, then stir in the uncooked egg-yolk, the milk, and sifted flour. The dough should be stiff enough to roll. Cut into small round shapes with cooky-cutters, brush these with beaten egg-white and sprinkle with finely chopped almonds. Bake in a slow oven (300° F.).
A short-list recipe with one unusual step and one missing measurement. The sieved hard-cooked yolks are the point of the cookie, not a curiosity, and the flour is left entirely to your judgment.
- The hinge: sieved cooked yolksPressing hard-cooked yolks through a sieve and creaming them into the fat gives a dense, short, sandy crumb rather than a chewy one. The yolks must be fully cold and pushed through fine enough that no lumps remain, or they show as yellow flecks and pockets of grit in the baked cookie.
- Flour is unmeasured"Flour to stiffen for rolling" is genuinely open-ended. With ½ cup butter and ⅓ cup sugar, expect somewhere between 1½ and 1¾ cups of all-purpose flour; add it in stages and stop as soon as the dough holds together and no longer sticks to the hands.
- Egg white is not in the ingredient listThe method calls for beaten egg-white to glue the almonds on, but the list only accounts for the yolks. Reserve the white from the raw egg you separate; one is plenty for a batch this size.
- Slow ovenThe recipe itself gives 300 degrees F, low enough that these will set pale rather than brown. Reckon on roughly 18 to 25 minutes for thin rounds, and pull them when the undersides are set and barely coloured.
- Chill before rollingThe recipe says nothing about chilling the dough. Rest it 30 minutes in the refrigerator; a butter dough this rich rolled at modern room temperature will tear and stick.
- AlmondsBlanched means skinned — pour boiling water over whole almonds, stand a minute, and slip the skins off, or buy them already blanched. Chop them fine; coarse pieces slide off the glaze during baking.
- YieldRoughly two to four dozen small cookies at about 1 1/2 inches across, depending on how thin you roll and how large your cutter is.
Cooked-yolk doughs turn up in central European baking under a range of names in the Bohemian and Austrian tradition, and are associated with a crisp, crumbly cookie that keeps well. The Butterick book, published for an American readership by a pattern and magazine company, collected such recipes under national labels the way many general household compilations of the period did: "Bohemian," here, signals an immigrant-community recipe passed into the English-language mainstream rather than a documented regional formula. Bohemia was a crown land of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and "Bohemian" was a common American term for what would later be called Czech.