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Filled Cookies
1 cup sugar
3½ cups flour
½ cup shortening
3 teaspoons baking-powder
1 egg
½ teaspoon salt
½ cup milk
1 teaspoon vanilla
Mix ingredients in order given, sifting the flour with the bakingpowder and salt before adding it. Roll thin, cut, and put in greased pans. Place a teaspoon of filling on each, not allowing it to spread to the edge, place another cookie on top, press down the edges, and bake in shallow pans in a moderate oven (380-390° F.).
For the filling, take:
½ cup sugar
1 cup chopped raisins
1 tablespoon flour
½ cup water
Mix sugar and flour together, add to the other ingredients, and cook until thick, stirring constantly. Dates, figs, prunes, apricots, or any marmalade may be used instead of raisins.
A straightforward rolled sugar-cookie dough sandwiched around a cooked fruit paste. The recipe is unusually explicit about temperature for its era, so most of the work is in handling the dough and the filling.
- Oven380-390°F as given is fine; 375°F on a modern thermostat is close enough. Bake 10-12 minutes, until the edges are just colored and the tops are set.
- ShorteningHalf a cup of shortening means lard or a vegetable shortening; butter works and gives better flavor, though the dough will spread slightly more. Weigh it if you can: 4 oz.
- Cool the filling firstThis is the hinge. The raisin paste must be completely cold and stiff before it goes on the dough, or it will thin out, run to the edges, and glue the cookies to the pan.
- Seal properlyLeave a clear half-inch border, then press the edges with a fork or the floured rim of a smaller cutter. Any gap will vent hot fruit syrup onto the sheet.
- Flour amountThree and a half cups is a stiff dough by modern standards. Sifted, as the recipe directs, it is roughly 14-15 oz rather than the 17 oz or so you get scooping unsifted flour. Sift or spoon the flour in lightly, and hold back the last quarter cup if the dough is already firm enough to roll.
- "Roll thin"About 1/8 inch. Thicker and the sandwich becomes a bun; thinner and the filling breaks through. Chill the dough 30 minutes before rolling.
- Greased pansParchment is easier and prevents the sugar in any leaked filling from welding to the sheet.
Filled cookies of this type were a staple of American home baking from the late nineteenth century onward, and the raisin-filled version became especially common in the Midwest. The logic is economic: a cheap flour-and-milk dough is stretched around a small amount of dried fruit cooked down with sugar and thickened with a spoonful of flour, so a handful of raisins flavors a large batch of cookies. The Butterick book, published by a pattern company for a readership of home sewers and housekeepers, is full of this kind of frugal, adaptable formula, and the closing line here is characteristic of the genre: dates, figs, prunes, apricots, or any marmalade may be used instead, depending on what the pantry held. The numbered temperature reflects the period's growing use of oven thermometers and gas ranges, though the recipe still leads with the older term, giving the figures as a gloss on "a moderate oven" rather than a replacement for it.