Home › Directions For Frosting › Good Cookies
Good Cookies
Two cups sugar, one of butter, one of sour cream or milk, three eggs, one tea-spoon soda; mix soft, roll thin, sift granulated sugar over them, and gently roll it in. - Mrs. Judge West, Bellefontaine.
A plain rolled sugar cookie from the era when a cook was expected to know how much flour "mix soft" meant. Everything here works, but you supply the flour yourself.
- The missing ingredientNo flour quantity is given, which is common in receipts of this kind: you added flour until the dough was the stated consistency. Expect somewhere around 5 to 6 cups for this quantity of sugar, butter and eggs. Add it gradually and stop as soon as the dough holds together and is just firm enough to roll.
- "Mix soft"This is the hinge. The dough should be softer than modern rolled cookie dough — barely stiff enough to lift off the board. Overshooting on flour is the one thing that will ruin these, giving hard, dry cookies rather than tender ones. Chill the soft dough an hour and it will roll thin without extra flour.
- Sour cream or sour milk"Sour cream or milk" most probably means sour cream or soured milk, acidic enough to react with the soda. Commercial cultured sour cream or buttermilk both work; fresh sweet milk gives the soda nothing to react with, and the cookies can taste of it. If you use sweet milk, substitute baking powder instead.
- Soda measureOld spoon measures were not standardised and were often taken rounded, so this teaspoon may have been somewhat more than a level modern one. Sift or dissolve it thoroughly — undissolved soda leaves brown-yellow bitter spots.
- ButterA cup of butter here is 2 sticks, 8 oz. Period butter was salted and often heavily so; if using unsalted, add half a teaspoon of salt, which the recipe otherwise never mentions.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Thin rolled cookies want a fairly quick oven — 375°F — for 7 to 9 minutes, until the edges just colour. They firm as they cool, so pull them while the centres still look soft.
- Rolling in the sugarSift sugar over the rolled sheet and pass the pin over it lightly so the grains embed rather than scatter. This is the whole finish of the cookie: it gives a crackled, crisp top that sprinkling after cutting does not.
- YieldRolled thin and cut at about 2½ inches, this quantity makes a great many cookies — several dozen at least, depending on how much flour the dough took and how thin it was rolled. Halving the recipe is sensible for a modern household.
The Dixie Cook-Book, like many of the big subscription cookbooks of the period, was assembled from contributions signed by name and town — here Mrs. Judge West of Bellefontaine, identified by her husband's office in a style common at the time. That attribution is much of the point of such books: they circulated as community records as much as instruction manuals, and a contributor's receipt carried her standing with it. The recipe itself belongs to the broad family of American sour-cream cookies, which depended on the household's own souring milk and on saleratus or soda to lift it — a pairing common in home baking from the middle of the nineteenth century until commercial baking powder became general. The vagueness about flour looks like convention rather than carelessness: flour varied in moisture and strength from barrel to barrel, and an instruction to mix until soft may have been more use than a fixed measure.