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Caraway Cookies
Two cups of sugar; one-half cup of butter; one cup of sweet milk; one teaspoon of baking powder; caraway seeds; flour enough to roll out.
A bare-bones rolled cookie of the kind a 1911 cook was expected to finish by feel. Everything omitted here — flour quantity, oven heat, baking time — has to be supplied by the baker.
- "Flour enough to roll out"Somewhere in the region of 4 to 6 cups for this quantity of sugar, butter and milk, added gradually until the dough is just stiff enough to handle on a floured board. Stop as early as you can; every extra cup makes a harder, drier cookie.
- OvenNo temperature or time is given. As modern guidance, rolled cookies of this sort suit a moderate oven, roughly 350-375F for 8 to 12 minutes, until the edges are just colouring.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh whole milk, named to distinguish it from the soured milk or buttermilk that a period recipe would pair with saleratus. Baking powder here confirms plain milk is correct.
- Baking powder quantityOne teaspoon for four-odd cups of flour is very little by modern standards, and pre-1911 baking powders were often single-acting and less reliable. Two teaspoons gives the lift a modern cook expects; the original amount produces a dense, crisp, biscuit-like cookie, which may well be what was intended.
- Caraway seedsAlso unmeasured. A tablespoon or so for a batch this size gives a clear seed flavour without dominating; adjust to taste. Crush a portion between your fingers if you want the flavour to carry further.
- Butter and saltThe butter was most likely salted. If you use unsalted, add about 1/2 teaspoon of salt, or the cookies will taste flat despite all that sugar.
- Thickness and yieldRoll to about 1/4 inch and cut with a 2 1/2-inch cutter for roughly five dozen. Rolled thinner they turn brittle; thicker and the low leavening shows as a heavy centre.
- Handling the doughChill the dough at least an hour before rolling. A butter-and-milk dough with no egg to bind it tears and sticks when worked warm.
Caraway was the standing flavouring of English and American plain baking long before vanilla extract was cheap or widely sold — seed cakes, caraway comfits and seed cookies appear steadily in nineteenth-century household books, and the seed had the double advantage of keeping indefinitely in the pantry and being credited with settling the stomach. Cookies of this sort belong to the everyday, roll-and-cut, no-egg sweets made from staples on hand, not the company cakes. By 1911, when Butterick was publishing this volume alongside its dress patterns for the same audience of home managers, caraway cookies may already have been a slightly old-fashioned taste, the kind of thing a grandmother made; within a generation vanilla and chocolate had largely displaced the seed from American cookie jars.