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Christmas Peppernuts
2 cups brown sugar
1 cup chopped nuts
2 eggs
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 teaspoon soda
1 teaspoon nutmeg
1 tablespoon hot water
3½ cups sifted bread flour
Mix the sugar with the well-beaten eggs, add the soda dissolved in hot water, the nuts, and the spices sifted with the flour. Add more flour if necessary to make a dough stiff enough to roll. Roll out until the dough is about one-eighth inch thick. Cut in tiny rounds about as large as a quarter of a dollar and bake in a quick oven (400° F.) until brown. Roll at once in powdered sugar.
A hard, dry, spice-heavy dough with no butter and no liquid beyond a spoonful of hot water — closer to a rusk than a modern cookie, and meant to be kept in a tin for weeks.
- The hinge: the dough must be stiff, not softThere is almost no moisture here, so the eggs and the sugar's own syrup are all that bind it. Work it until it holds together as a firm, slightly tacky mass. The recipe does allow more flour if the dough is too slack to roll, but add it sparingly, as too much will tend to make the finished nuts dry and chalky.
- Bread flour is meant literallyBread flour here means the ordinary hard-wheat household flour of the period, as distinct from pastry flour, and its higher protein suits the dense, tooth-testing bite of a peppernut. All-purpose will work and will give a slightly tenderer cookie; cake flour will not.
- Soda without acidThe only acid available to react with the soda is the molasses in the brown sugar, so use a dark or old-fashioned brown sugar rather than a very pale one.
- OvenThe 400°F is given in the original and is correct for pieces this small. Expect 6 to 8 minutes; they brown at the edges quickly and go from done to hard in under a minute.
- "As large as a quarter of a dollar"About one inch across. At an eighth of an inch thick this yields a very large number of tiny cookies, which is why the recipe seems outsized for a cookie.
- Roll at once in powdered sugarThe instruction is not decorative timing. The cookies must be hot so the sugar clings and partly melts into a thin glaze; once cool they take almost none.
- Chopped nutsUnspecified, as was usual. Walnuts, hazelnuts or almonds all suit; chop them fine, since coarse pieces will tear dough rolled this thin.
- KeepingThey bake hard and are supposed to. Stored airtight for a week or two with a slice of apple they soften considerably, which is the traditional handling.
Peppernuts are the English name for the German Pfeffernüsse and Dutch pepernoten, small hard spice cakes long associated with the December feasts — St. Nicholas in the Low Countries, Christmas in the German lands — and carried to American kitchens by German and Dutch immigrant families. The "pepper" of the name is generally traced to the medieval use of Pfeffer as a loose term for costly imported spice in general rather than black pepper specifically, though many older recipes do include a pinch of it; this version keeps only cinnamon and nutmeg, an unmistakably Americanized spicing. Its appearance in a general household manual of this period, rather than in a book of foreign cookery, may suggest that the little cakes had found a place in the mainstream Christmas repertoire by the early twentieth century — helped by the fact that they use no butter, keep for weeks in a tin, and can be made in enormous quantity from cheap pantry staples.