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New Year's Cookies
Warm slightly three-quarters of a pound of butter and beat it until creamy with one pound of caster-sugar; beat three eggs well and mix them with the butter; then stir in slowly one pint of the best sifted-flour and one tablespoonful of caraway seeds. Stir one teaspoonful of saleratus in one teacupful of milk until well dissolved, then strain it, stir in one-half teacupful of cider with it and mix gradually in with the other ingredients. Work the mixture well, adding more flour if required to bring it to the desired stiffness. Sprinkle some flour over the table, place the paste on, roll it out and cut into round cakes. Butter a baking-sheet, lay on the cakes and bake them in a quick oven. When a trifle browned, arrange the cakes on a dish, and serve hot.
A rolled soda cookie of the old New York kind, leavened by cider working against saleratus. The written flour quantity is only a starting point, which is why the recipe tells you to add more.
- The hinge: flour by feelOne pint of sifted flour is about two cups, roughly 8 to 9 ounces, which is far too little to make a rollable paste against a pound of sugar and three-quarters of a pound of butter. Expect to work in a good deal more, likely double, until the dough is stiff enough to roll without sticking. Chill it before rolling and the job becomes much easier.
- SaleratusSaleratus is baking soda, though the nineteenth-century article was often potassium rather than sodium bicarbonate and slightly weaker. One teaspoon of modern baking soda is the right substitution here.
- Why the cider is thereThe soda needs an acid, and sweet apple cider supplies it. Any apple cider or unsweetened apple juice will serve. Mix the cider and milk in at the last moment and get the cakes into the oven promptly, since the lift begins immediately.
- TeacupfulA teacup in period American recipes is smaller than a standard cup, and sources vary: anywhere from about 4 to 6 fluid ounces. Taking it at the larger end, read the milk as roughly three-quarters of a cup and the cider as a scant half cup.
- Caster-sugarSold today as superfine or baker's sugar. Ordinary granulated will do if you pulse it briefly in a food processor; the fine grain helps when creaming a pound of sugar into the slightly warmed butter the recipe calls for.
- Quick ovenRoughly 400 to 425F. At the top of that range these will color in about 7 to 9 minutes, and with this much sugar they go from browned to burnt quickly. Check at 6 minutes.
- CarawayA tablespoon of caraway seed in a batch this size is assertive and deliberate; seeded New Year's cakes were the norm rather than a novelty. Reduce to a teaspoon if you want the anise-adjacent note without it dominating.
- Yield and servingRolled thin and cut at about two and a half inches, the batch runs to five or six dozen. The instruction to serve them hot is unusual for a rolled cookie and worth honoring; they are best warm, and they crisp as they cool.
Serving cookies on New Year's Day is a New York custom of Dutch descent, and the word cookie itself comes from the Dutch koekje, a little cake. Well into the nineteenth century, New York households kept an open door on January 1 with a table of cakes and cordials for callers, and the New Year's cake, often thin, spiced or seeded with caraway, and sometimes stamped from a carved wooden mold, was the expected offering. Caraway had long been the seed of choice for such keeping-cakes in Dutch and English baking. That Oscar Tschirky included the recipe in his 1896 collection for the Waldorf places it at the moment the custom was fading into nostalgia: a hotel kitchen recording a domestic New York tradition rather than a hotel dish, and one leavened in the older American manner with saleratus and cider rather than with baking powder.