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Ada's Sugar Cakes
Three cups sugar, two of butter, three eggs well beaten, one teaspoon soda, flour sufficient to roll out.
A rolled sugar cookie stated in the shorthand of a cook who already knew what the dough should feel like. The proportions are rich even by cookie standards, and two details need attention before you start: the leavening and the undeclared flour.
- The hinge: flour by feel"Flour sufficient to roll out" means a dough stiff enough to lift off the board without stretching, which for this quantity of sugar, butter and egg is likely to be somewhere around five to six cups, though it will vary with the flour and the eggs. Add it a cup at a time and stop as soon as the dough stops sticking to your fingers.
- Soda with no acidA teaspoon of soda has nothing sour to work against here, so it will not give much lift and can leave a faint soapy taste. Soda was also valued for browning, and butter of the period was not always sweet, either of which may explain its presence; if you want reliable rise, baking powder is the modern equivalent for a sweet dough of this kind.
- Butter quantityTwo cups is one pound. Have it properly softened but not melted, and cream it with the sugar until pale before the eggs go in, or the dough will separate and be greasy on the board.
- Chill before rollingWith this much butter the dough is unworkable at room temperature. An hour in the refrigerator, wrapped, makes it roll cleanly and keeps the cut shapes from spreading.
- Thickness and ovenThe recipe gives no oven direction at all. Roll about a quarter inch thick and bake at around 350F for 8 to 10 minutes, until the edges are just colored and the centers still look pale. Rolled thinner they will be crisp and will burn quickly at the rim.
- YieldExpect roughly five to six dozen cookies from a two-and-a-half-inch cutter, depending on how much flour goes in and how thick they are rolled. The original gives no count.
- About the section headingThe recipe sits under "Directions For Frosting" in the book's arrangement, but it carries no icing of its own.
Sugar cakes, in nineteenth-century American usage, meant a rolled and cut cookie rather than anything resembling a layer cake; "cake" long covered small flat baked goods, as it still does in "pancake" and "oatcake." The Dixie Cook Book gathered such recipes under contributors' names, among them a first name alone -- Ada. The telegraphic style is typical: three cups, two of butter, three eggs, and flour to suit, on the reasonable assumption that anyone reading had made rolled dough before and knew when it was right. The single teaspoon of soda marks the period too, the decades after saleratus and soda had become cheap household staples but before commercial baking powder had fully displaced them in home receipt books.