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Cookies (One cup butter two of sugar)
One cup butter, two of sugar, one of cold water, half tea-spoon soda, two eggs and just flour enough to roll. -Mrs. Mary F. Orr.
A skeleton recipe of the kind that fills nineteenth-century community cookbooks: proportions only, on the assumption that the cook already knows what a rolled cookie should look like. The missing pieces are flour quantity, oven heat and time.
- Flour is the real variable"Just flour enough to roll" means a dough stiff enough to lift off the board without stretching. With one cup butter, two cups sugar and one cup water, expect somewhere between 5 and 7 cups of flour. Add it in stages and stop as soon as the dough holds a rolled sheet; this cannot be converted to an exact figure.
- Chill before rollingThe cup of cold water makes a slack dough that will fight you at room temperature. An hour in the refrigerator lets you roll it thin.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because none could be. Rolled sugar cookies of this type bake at 375F for 7 to 10 minutes, until the edges just colour.
- Soda with no acidHalf a teaspoon of soda with water rather than sour milk or molasses leaves nothing for it to react with beyond the sugar and heat. The lift will be slight, and any excess reads as a soapy, metallic edge. Measure it level, or substitute an equal amount of baking powder if you want the rise.
- SugarTwo cups to one of butter is sweet by modern standards and was not unusual in books of this period. Reducing to a cup and a half will affect spread and texture as well as sweetness.
- FlavouringThe original gives none. A teaspoon of vanilla, a grating of nutmeg, or lemon zest all sit comfortably in this dough.
- YieldRolled to about a quarter inch and cut with a 2½-inch cutter, this makes roughly five to six dozen. It is a batch built for a household or a church supper, not a plate of eight.
The Dixie Cook-Book (1883) belonged to the era of the compiled community cookbook, in which recipes arrived from contributors by name and were printed close to the form in which they were written down. Mrs. Mary F. Orr's cookies are typical of the genre: a ratio rather than a method, addressed to a cook who had made rolled cookies since girlhood and needed only to be reminded of the proportions. The word cookie itself is generally traced to the Dutch koekje, "little cake," carried into American English through New York and firmly domesticated by the middle of the nineteenth century, while British books of the same decade were still calling much the same thing a biscuit. Recipes like this one also mark the point at which chemical leavening had become ordinary in the American kitchen — soda appears without comment or explanation, as though it had always been there.