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Plain Cookies
⅓ cup butter or shortening
2 cups flour
½ cup sugar
⅛ teaspoon salt
½ cup milk
2 teaspoons baking-powder
1 egg
½ teaspoon vanilla
Cream together thoroughly the butter or shortening and the sugar. Add the slightly beaten egg. Mix and sift the dry mixture. ingredients and add alternately with the milk to the first and Add flavoring. Toss on lightly floured board, roll thin, cut oven place on a greased baking-sheet. Bake in a moderate (350° F.) twelve to fifteen minutes.
A plain rolled cookie with a soft, cake-like dough. The text has been garbled by the typesetter in places, but the method is standard creaming, and the original usefully gives an actual oven temperature.
- The garbled lineThe instruction reads "add alternately with the milk to the first and Add flavoring" — the intended sequence is to add the sifted dry ingredients and the milk alternately to the creamed mixture, then stir in the vanilla.
- Oven350°F as printed, which matches modern practice for a rolled cookie. Twelve to fifteen minutes is right for a thin cookie; pull them when the edges are just colored and the centers still look pale.
- Chill before rollingWith half a cup of milk to two cups of flour this is a soft, sticky dough. An hour in the refrigerator makes it possible to roll thin without working in extra flour, which is what turns plain cookies tough.
- Shortening"Butter or shortening" in this period would generally have meant lard or a compound vegetable fat, both firmer than today's whipped shortening. Butter gives better flavor and a crisper edge; use it unless you want a paler, softer cookie.
- Baking-powderTwo teaspoons for two cups of flour is a normal modern double-acting quantity as well, so no adjustment is needed. If the tin is more than a year old, replace it — stale leavening is a common cause of flat cookies.
- Greased baking-sheetParchment does the same job with less spread and no scrubbing.
- YieldNot given. Rolled to about ⅛ inch and cut with a 2½-inch round, expect roughly three to four dozen.
- SaltAn eighth of a teaspoon assumes salted butter. With unsalted, take it up to a scant half teaspoon.
"Plain" in a cookie chapter of this period generally marks a base recipe rather than an apology — the plainest version against which spiced, fruited, nut and molasses variations are measured. Butterick, better known for dress patterns, published this collection for broadly the same audience as its magazines: women running a kitchen without a cook. A printed Fahrenheit oven temperature was still relatively uncommon at this date; many cookbooks of the previous generation said only "a moderate oven," since a coal or wood range had no dial to read, and the move toward printed numbers roughly tracks the spread of gas ranges with oven thermometers.