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Brown-Sugar Cookies
2 cups brown sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla
1 cup melted shortening
1 teaspoon soda
Flour to mix stiff
3 eggs
I/4 cup milk
Mix ingredients in order given. Add just enough flour to roll.
Cut into shapes as desired. Sprinkle with brown sugar, and bake in a moderate oven (380° F.).
A plain rolled cookie of the type designed to be mixed in one bowl and cut fast. The recipe gives no flour quantity and no baking time, so both need supplying.
- "Flour to mix stiff"Expect roughly 4 to 4 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour, added in stages until the dough just holds together and pulls from the bowl. Stop as soon as it will roll; the extra half cup that makes handling easy is the same half cup that makes the cookie dry.
- Chill before rollingWith a full cup of melted fat the dough is slack and greasy when freshly mixed. An hour in the refrigerator, covered, turns it into something that rolls at 1/4 inch without tearing or sticking.
- The shorteningIn this period shortening meant lard or a hydrogenated vegetable fat such as Crisco. Any solid fat works: melted butter gives the best flavor, vegetable shortening the most tender crumb. Measure the cup solid, then melt it, and let it cool slightly so it does not cook the eggs.
- Soda, not baking powderOne teaspoon of soda relies on the slight acidity of the brown sugar and milk. Substituting white sugar removes that acidity, so the soda may be left partly unneutralized; keeping the brown sugar is the safer course, and dark brown will give a stronger flavor.
- Oven380° F. is a precise figure for the period, given here alongside the older term 'moderate oven.' Set a modern oven to 375°, the nearest dial setting.
- Baking timeNone is given. At 375°F, 1/4-inch cookies need 8 to 10 minutes, until the edges are set and the centers still look slightly soft. Brown sugar darkens early, so judge by edge firmness rather than color.
- The sugar toppingSprinkle the brown sugar on just before baking and press it lightly into the surface with the palm or a rolling pin, or it will slide off the cut shapes in the oven.
- VanillaA tablespoon is three times a modern measure. Two teaspoons of commercial extract is plenty.
- YieldAbout five dozen 2 1/2-inch cookies. They keep a week in a tin and are firm enough to pack or ship.
The Butterick Publishing Company sold dress patterns first and domestic advice second, and its recipe books were aimed at home cooks. That shows in this formula: one bowl, ingredients added in order, no creaming stage, and a fat that is melted rather than worked in. Brown sugar cookies belong to a large family of American rolled cookies that lean on molasses-bearing sugar for both flavor and the acidity that activates baking soda, a habit dating to the mid-nineteenth-century spread of saleratus in home kitchens. The stated 380 ecipes of the previous generation said "a moderate oven" and left the cook to test with flour or a scrap of paper, and the move toward specific numbers is often associated with the spread of the oven thermometer and the thermostatically regulated gas range, though the older language persisted alongside it.