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Salt (Cups flour enough more to roll)
1/2 cup butter (chicken fat or beef dripping may be substituted). 1 cup sugar. 1 cup thick sour milk. 3/4 teaspoonful soda. 1/2 teaspoonful cinnamon. 1/2 teaspoonful clove. 2 cups flour; enough more to roll out Cream butter and sugar. Dissolve soda in hot water and add to milk. Mix all together, making soft dough. Use as little extra flour as possible.
Chill dough, and use only small portion at a time.
Roll out thin, sprinkle a little granulated sugar and two or three currants on top. Bake in hot oven.
The printed ingredient list has been lost except for the flour line, so what survives is a method rather than a full recipe: a thin rolled sugar cookie of the sour-milk-and-soda type. Read the points below before deciding whether to attempt it.
- The ingredient list is incompleteButter, sugar, soda and milk are all called for in the method but their quantities never made it onto the page. Two cups of flour "and enough more to roll out" is the only figure given, so any amounts you use are your own reconstruction, not the book's.
- Soda dissolved in hot waterA common habit of pre-baking-powder baking. Dissolving the soda in a spoonful of hot water disperses it evenly through a soft dough that will not be beaten hard, and helps avoid the bitter yellow specks that undissolved soda leaves. Recipes of this shape usually assume sour milk or buttermilk to react with the soda; the text here says only "milk," and with sweet milk the leavening will be weak and the taste may turn soapy.
- "Hot oven" means 425F"Hot oven" -- conventionally reckoned somewhere around 400-425F. For a cookie rolled genuinely thin, that is a matter of a few minutes only. Watch the edges rather than the clock; at this thickness the gap between pale and burnt is very short.
- Chilling and small portionsThis is the instruction that matters. A soft butter dough handled warm will demand more and more flour and bake up tough. Keep the bulk of it refrigerated and roll one piece at a time, returning scraps to the cold before re-rolling.
- CurrantsZante currants, the small dried grape, not fresh red or black currants. The recipe calls for a sprinkle of granulated sugar and two or three currants on top; press them in so they do not fall off in the oven.
- YieldWith the other quantities missing, this can only be guessed at; two cups of flour rolled thin might give something in the region of three to four dozen small cookies, depending on the cutter.
The recipe sits in a chapter on left-over bread, which it has nothing to do with; from the damaged page one might infer that the compiler's ingredient column has slipped, and that the title line has picked up a stray "Salt" from the missing list. Books of this kind were assembled at speed from contributed household cards, and the typesetting shows it. The cookie itself is the plainest sort of American rolled sugar cookie: creamed butter and sugar, sour milk, soda dissolved in hot water, flour added by feel until the dough will just take a rolling pin. Versions appear in community cookbooks of the period, usually under a contributor's name. Cookbooks devoted to left-overs multiplied in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when domestic economy was taught as a discipline and waste in the kitchen was treated as a moral matter as much as a financial one.