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English Cookies
One ounce of ammonia dissolved in a pint of milk overnight, four eggs, four cups of sugar, two of butter, one table-spoon of salt, currants and candied orange-peel to taste; mix soft. Unrivaled.- Mrs. Hicks, Macon.
A large contributor's cookie recipe of the kind that assumes the cook already knows what a cookie dough looks like. Two things need settling before you start: what the ammonia is, and where the flour went.
- The ammonia is baker's ammoniaThis means carbonate of ammonia, also sold as hartshorn or ammonium bicarbonate, a leavening still used for crisp Northern European biscuits. It is not household ammonia solution, which is a cleaning product and must never go into food.
- An ounce is a great deal of itOne ounce is on the order of two tablespoons, dissolved overnight in a pint of milk. Baker's ammonia works only in thin, dry goods where the gas can escape completely; anything thick will keep an acrid smell. Modern formulas for a batch this size use a teaspoon or two.
- The flour is missing"Mix soft" is the entire instruction for it. With a pint of milk, four eggs, four cups of sugar and two of butter, expect somewhere in the region of 12 to 14 cups of flour, added until the dough is stiff enough to roll but still soft to the hand.
- Two cups of butterA cup of butter is half a pound, so this is a pound of butter. Nineteenth-century butter was often salted for keeping and varied in moisture; if using modern unsalted butter the salt below becomes more necessary, and with salted butter it should be cut back.
- A tablespoon of saltHigh even for a batch of this scale, and worth reducing to two teaspoons unless the butter is unsalted.
- Currants and peelCurrants here are dried Zante currants, not fresh berries. Chop good-quality candied orange peel rather than using the mixed candied fruit sold for fruitcake.
- Oven and handlingNo temperature is given. Roll thin, cut, and bake at 375F for 8 to 10 minutes until the edges color. Thin is not optional if the baker's ammonia is used at anything near the stated amount.
- YieldThis is a bulk recipe for a household or a church table. Expect eight to ten dozen cookies of ordinary size; halving or quartering it is sensible.
Baker's ammonia is the older leavening, in use well before chemical baking powders reached American kitchens in the middle of the nineteenth century, and it survived longest in exactly the sort of thin, crisp, keep-in-a-tin biscuit this recipe describes. It was commonly called hartshorn because the ammonia was once distilled from the shavings of deer antler. The name "English cookies" is doing loose work here, as such titles often did in community cookbooks: it signals a plain rolled currant biscuit in the British manner rather than any particular English original. The Dixie Cook Book, like the Buckeye books it grew out of, was assembled largely from recipes signed by named contributors, and Mrs. Hicks of Macon supplies both her formula and her verdict on it. "Unrivaled" is the kind of endorsement that stood in for the testing notes a modern book would give.