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Eggless Cookies
Two cups sugar, one of milk, one of butter, half tea-spoon nut meg, half tea-spoon soda, flour to make thick enough to roll.
A rolled sugar cookie stripped to its essentials, written for cooks who knew what cookie dough should feel like. The original gives no flour quantity, no oven temperature and no baking time, so the notes below fill the gaps.
- Flour, the open question"Flour to make thick enough to roll" lands somewhere around 5 to 6 cups with these proportions, but it depends on your butter and how warm the kitchen is. Add it a cup at a time until the dough holds a rolled shape without sticking, and stop there — extra flour is what makes eggless cookies tough.
- The soda needs an acidHalf a teaspoon of soda against sweet milk has little to react with. Many recipes of this type call for sour milk or buttermilk, which is what makes soda work; with fresh milk the cookies will be denser and may carry a faint soapy note.
- OvenThe recipe gives no temperature or baking time at all. Bake at 375F on the middle rack until the edges are just colouring, roughly 8 to 10 minutes for a quarter-inch cookie.
- ButterA cup of butter is two sticks, 8 oz. It was also likely salted; if you use unsalted, add half a teaspoon of salt, which the recipe otherwise omits entirely.
- NutmegHalf a teaspoon is a lot of nutmeg by current habit, and it is the only flavouring in the cookie. Grate it fresh — pre-ground nutmeg that has sat in a cupboard will taste of nothing here.
- ChillingNot mentioned, but a soft butter-and-milk dough rolls far better after an hour in the refrigerator. Roll a quarter-inch thick on a lightly floured board and cut.
- YieldExpect about five dozen two-and-a-half-inch cookies. The dough halves cleanly if that is more than you want.
Eggless cookies appear all through nineteenth-century American household books for a plain economic reason: eggs were seasonal and expensive, hens laid poorly in cold weather, and a cook with a full butter crock but an empty egg basket still wanted something to put out with coffee. The Dixie Cook Book, published in the 1880s, gathers such receipts, and they are written in the shorthand of cooks who assumed the reader already knew the shape of the dough. Without egg to bind and enrich, these cookies rely on the butter for tenderness -- which may be why the flour is left unmeasured, the one judgment the recipe trusts you to make yourself.