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Lemon Snaps
A large cup sugar, two-thirds cup butter, half tea-spoon soda dissolved in two tea-spoons hot water, flour enough to roll thin; flavor with lemon. -Mrs. E. L. C., Springfield.
A rolled sugar cookie with no eggs and no liquid but two teaspoons of hot water, this depends entirely on creaming and on rolling thin. The recipe assumes a cook who knows what cookie dough should feel like, so the flour is left to judgment.
- The hinge: roll it thinThickness does most of the work here. Roll to about 1/8 inch; rolled thicker, these bake up soft and stay soft.
- "A large cup"Nineteenth-century cups ran a little under or over the modern 8 oz, and "large" probably means a generous measure rather than a level one. Read it loosely as a scant 1 1/4 cups sugar, with two-thirds cup (about 5 oz) butter.
- Flour enough to roll thinThe recipe leaves this to judgment, and the workable amount is limited by how little liquid there is: butter, sugar and two teaspoons of water only. Add flour until the dough is firm enough to leave the board cleanly but still just tacky; overshooting gives a dry, sandy cookie with no bite.
- Soda without an acidThere is no sour milk, molasses or cream of tartar here, so the half teaspoon of soda has no acid to react with; it will give a little lift as it breaks down in the heat, but its main effect is to raise the pH, which promotes browning and spread and encourages the thin, crisp texture the name promises.
- No oven temperature givenBake at 375F for 6 to 9 minutes, until the edges have colored and the centers look set. Thin sugar doughs turn from pale to burnt in under a minute, so watch the last two.
- Flavor with lemonPeriod books mean either bottled lemon extract (a teaspoon or so) or grated rind. Finely grated zest from one lemon gives more flavor and holds up better in the oven; juice will slacken the dough and is best avoided.
- No eggs, no saltHome butter was often salted, which may be why no salt is called for. If using unsalted butter, add 1/4 teaspoon salt. The absence of egg means the dough is short and crumbly to handle -- chill it 30 minutes before rolling.
- YieldSeveral dozen thin 2-inch cookies, the exact count depending on how much flour is worked in and how thin they are rolled. They keep well in a tin.
Lemon snaps belong to a family of thin, hard rolled cookies -- ginger snaps, sugar snaps, caraway snaps -- that filled American cookie jars before the drop cookie took over. "Snap" describes the sound and the break, not a technique, and such cookies were valued precisely because they kept for weeks in a tin without going stale, which mattered in a household that baked in batches around the weekly fire. Lemon flavoring could come from bottled extract or from grated rind; the receipt does not say which. Like much of The Dixie Cook Book, this one arrives as a contributed receipt signed with initials and a town, a compiled-community format widely used in American cookbook publishing in the last quarter of the nineteenth century -- and it shows the format's characteristic trust in the reader, giving proportions and leaving the oven, the timing and the amount of flour entirely to her judgment.