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Cookies Without Eggs
Take one and one-half cups of butter; two cups sugar; one cup milk; two teaspoons of baking powder and enough flour to roll out as soft as possible.
A rolled sugar cookie stripped to its essentials — the original assumes you know how to handle a soft dough and how hot your oven runs, since it says nothing about either. Two things need filling in: the flour and the baking.
- The hinge: keep the dough soft"As soft as possible" is the whole instruction. Add flour only until the dough just stops sticking to your hands, then chill it an hour so it can be rolled without more flour going in. An over-floured eggless dough bakes dry and hard.
- How much flourThe original gives no figure. With this ratio of fat, sugar and milk, expect somewhere between 4 1/2 and 6 cups of all-purpose flour depending on the day. Judge by feel, not by cup count.
- Oven and timeRoll about 1/4 inch thick and bake at 375F for 8 to 10 minutes, until the edges are just colouring. The original gives no oven guidance at all.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons in this much flour is on the low side by modern standards; baking powder of the period was single-acting. If your cookies come out dense, go to a scant tablespoon on the next batch.
- ButterOne and one-half cups is three sticks, 12 oz. Period butter was frequently salted and sometimes quite heavily so; with unsalted butter add 3/4 teaspoon salt or the cookies taste flat.
- FlavouringNone is listed. A teaspoon of vanilla, a grating of nutmeg, or lemon zest all suit the proportions.
- YieldA large batch: on the order of eight to ten dozen 2-inch cookies rolled 1/4 inch thick. They keep well in a tin for a week and freeze raw as cut rounds.
Eggless cookies were not a novelty or a hardship measure when the Butterick Cook Book appeared in the early twentieth century; they were housekeeping. Hens laid seasonally, and eggs in late winter were scarce and dear, so a well-run kitchen kept formulas that could be made without them. Butter and milk supply the richness the eggs would have given, and chemical leavening does the lifting, which is why the recipe reads as terse as it does: by 1900 commercial baking powder was cheap, reliable enough, and had largely displaced the older saleratus-and-sour-milk method that a cook of fifty years earlier would have used for the same dough.