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Peanut Cookies
Rub to a light cream one cup of butter and one and one-half cups of powdered sugar. Add three wellbeaten eggs, one teaspoon of lemon extract, one cup of finely chopped peanuts and about three cups of sifted flour with a pinch of salt. Pat into small round cakes and bake in a moderate oven.
A plain butter cookie carrying chopped peanuts, from an era when "cookie" recipes often gave neither a temperature nor a time. A few specifics fill the gaps.
- Oven temperatureA moderate oven is usually taken as 350 to 375F. Check at 10 minutes and expect 10 to 14 minutes total, until the edges just color.
- Powdered sugarIn period usage "powdered sugar" generally meant a finely ground sugar rather than the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Superfine (caster) sugar is the closest match and creams properly with the butter; modern confectioners' sugar will give a softer, more shortbread-like cookie.
- Flour is approximate"About three cups" leaves room for variation in the peanuts and eggs. Add the last half cup only as needed: the dough should be stiff enough to pat out without sticking, and no stiffer, or the cookies turn dry and hard.
- PeanutsUse roasted unsalted peanuts and chop them fine by hand or in a few pulses of a processor. Grinding too far releases oil and you get peanut butter, which changes the texture of the dough.
- Salted butterButter of the period was often salted and variable. If using salted butter, skip the added pinch of salt; with unsalted, a scant quarter teaspoon suits the sweetness better than a pinch.
- Shaping"Pat into small round cakes" means flattening walnut-sized pieces of dough by hand to about a quarter inch. Chilling the dough 30 minutes makes this much easier, since a cup of butter to three cups of flour is a soft mixture at room temperature.
- Lemon extractA full teaspoon of lemon extract is assertive by modern standards. Half a teaspoon, or the grated zest of one lemon, reads better today.
- YieldAbout four to five dozen cookies at two inches across. Space them an inch apart; they spread only slightly.
Peanuts moved from a Southern field crop and street snack to a respectable baking ingredient in American cookbooks between the 1890s and the 1910s, helped along by mechanical shelling, the spread of roasted peanuts at fairs and ballparks, and the arrival of commercial peanut butter in the same years. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, was among the publishers issuing cook books for the American household in these years.