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Caraway Cookies
½ cup butter or shortening
2 teaspoons baking-powder
½ teaspoon salt
1 cup sugar
¾ cup milk
1 egg
2 cups flour
1½ tablespoons caraway seeds
Cream the butter or shortening with the sugar; add beaten egg. Mix and sift the flour, baking-powder, and salt, and add alternately with the milk to the first mixture. Add caraway seeds. Toss on lightly floured board. Roll out about one-half inch thick and cut in fancy shapes. Place on greased baking-sheet and bake in moderate oven (380-390° F.) twelve to fifteen minutes.
"FROZEN" COOKIES
2 cups melted shortening
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 cup white sugar
4 cups flour
1 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon soda
3 eggs
Brazil nuts, filberts or almonds
1 teaspoon salt
Mix ingredients in the order given, sifting all the dry ingredients together before adding. Mold in long rolls or pack in a deep pan like a bread-pan and roll in clean cloth. Let stand in a cold place until hard. Slice thin, and bake in a moderate oven (380- 390° F.) until a golden brown. A roll may be kept indefinitely in a cold place.
These cookies are excellent to keep on hand, especially when the dough can be kept out-of-doors in cold weather. In case of an emergency they are easily brought in and quickly baked. Nuts in these cookies are very attractive when put in whole.
Two recipes run together here: a rolled caraway cookie and an icebox ("frozen") cookie whose dough was meant to be stored on a cold porch. Both are workable, but the quantities and handling need translating.
- The hinge: this is a soft doughThree-quarters of a cup of milk against two cups of flour gives a batter-like dough that will not roll at half an inch without sticking. Chill it at least an hour, work with a floured pin on a well-floured board, and expect to add a little more flour.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives 380-390F for its "moderate oven"; set a modern oven to 375F and check at ten minutes. Half-inch cookies bake up cakey and pale rather than crisp, so watch the edges rather than the tops for colour.
- Shortening"Shortening" in American baking of this period means lard or hydrogenated vegetable fat. Butter gives better flavour with caraway; the dough will spread slightly more.
- CarawayA tablespoon and a half in two cups of flour is assertive by current taste, and the seeds should be fresh - old caraway turns dusty and bitter. A teaspoon or two is closer to modern expectations, and the seeds can be lightly crushed to spread the flavour.
- YieldAbout two dozen cookies from 2½-inch cutters, fewer if the fancy shapes are large.
- "Frozen" cookies means chilled, not frozenThe name refers to firming the dough hard in a cold larder or outdoors, not to a freezer, which few households had. Refrigerate the rolls until solid, or freeze them and slice with a heavy sharp knife while barely thawed.
- That is a great deal of fatTwo cups of melted shortening is getting on for a pound against four cups of flour - very rich, and correct for a slice-and-bake dough that must stay sliceable. Do not reduce it much or the roll will crumble under the knife.
- Soda without an obvious acidThe molasses in the brown sugar is mildly acidic and will take up some of the soda; the cookies will brown well but rise very little, which is what you want from a thin sliced cookie.
- Storage, then and now"A roll may be kept indefinitely in a cold place" assumed a winter porch at near-freezing temperatures. Keep the dough tightly wrapped in the refrigerator for up to a week or in the freezer for a couple of months; egg-containing dough should not sit at ambient temperature.
- NutsNo quantity is given. A cup of whole Brazil nuts, filberts (hazelnuts) or almonds suits four cups of flour, and whole nuts do slice into the attractive cross-sections the book promises.
Caraway has one of the longest runs of any baking seed in English and American kitchens: seed cakes and caraway comfits were staples well before the seventeenth century, with caraway comfits appearing in late-sixteenth-century English sources, and the flavour survived in the United States chiefly in cookies and rye bread. Butterick, better known for dress patterns, published this collection as part of a broad early-twentieth-century business in domestic advice for women furnishing their own kitchens; the instructions are notably exact about oven degrees - the gas and electric ranges with thermometers that made such numbers meaningful were then still new. The icebox cookie beside it belongs to the same moment of transition: the dough is stored out of doors in cold weather, the older practice, but sliced and baked thin in a measured oven, the newer one.