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Chocolate Drop Cookies
2 squares chocolate
1 egg
½ cup butter or shortening
2 cups flour
1 cup brown sugar
¾ cup sweet milk
½ teaspoon soda
Melt the chocolate and add to the melted shortening. Add sugar, egg, milk, and soda and flour sifted together. Batter should be stiff enough to drop from the spoon. Drop by spoonfuls on greased pans, and bake in a moderate oven (350-375° F.). Frost, if desired.
A plain drop cookie from the era when unsweetened baking chocolate came in wrapped bars scored into squares. The dough is closer to a soft cake batter than a modern cookie dough, and it behaves accordingly.
- Squares of chocolateTwo squares means 2 ounces of unsweetened baking chocolate, still sold in 1-ounce squares. Do not substitute semi-sweet or chips; the recipe's sugar is calibrated for bitter chocolate.
- Sweet milkOrdinary fresh whole milk, named to distinguish it from the sour milk or buttermilk that other recipes in the book call for. Since there is no acid here, the half teaspoon of soda has little to react with beyond the brown sugar and cocoa solids, so expect modest lift and a soft, cakey crumb.
- Soda with the flourSift the soda through the flour rather than dumping it in, or you will get bitter spots; this is what the original directs, 'soda and flour sifted together.' Add sugar, egg and milk to the chocolate mixture, then the sifted flour and soda last.
- OvenThe original gives the number, which is unusual and welcome: 350-375F. Use 350F for a softer cookie, 375F if the batter is on the slack side and you want it to set before spreading.
- Stiff enough to dropThis is the hinge. Flour absorbency varied a good deal in this period, so the two cups is a starting point. The batter should mound on the spoon and release in a lump rather than run; add flour a tablespoon at a time until it does.
- Greased pansParchment on an ungreased sheet works better than grease, which encourages these cookies to spread thin at the edges.
- Timing and yieldNo time is given. At 350F expect 8-11 minutes, until the tops spring back when pressed lightly; they will look underdone at the center and firm as they cool. The batch makes roughly two and a half to three dozen cookies about two inches across.
- FrostingThe recipe says only 'frost, if desired.' A thin confectioners' sugar and milk glaze suits them, spread while the cookies are barely warm so it sets to a matte shell.
Chocolate drop cookies of this kind belong to the period when baking chocolate had become cheap and reliable enough for everyday use but chocolate chips did not yet exist, so any chocolate cookie meant melted bar chocolate stirred into a batter. The Butterick book was published by a pattern company whose business was selling advice to home sewers and housekeepers. The presence of both an oven temperature in degrees and the older vocabulary of a "moderate oven" suggests the transition years when oven thermometers were becoming more common in ordinary kitchens. The recipe's structure, a small amount of butter carried by milk and leavened with soda, is a standard soft drop cookie of American household cookery, closer kin to a cake than to the crisp butter cookies that later took over the name.