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Nashville Pepper-Nuts
One pound sugar, five eggs, half pound butter, half tea-cup milk, two tea-spoons baking-powder, flour enough to roll. -Mrs. Emma G. Rea.
A bare ingredient list in the style of its era, with the method assumed. Pepper-nuts are a rolled-and-cut cookie dough, and the whole question here is how much flour "enough to roll" means.
- Flour enough to rollWith a pound of sugar, five eggs, half a pound of butter and a half cup of milk, this takes a great deal of flour, likely six cups or more; the amount cannot be fixed from the original. Add it in stages and stop as soon as the dough holds a rope without slumping; more flour past that point makes the nuts hard rather than crisp.
- A pound of sugarThat is about 2 1/4 cups granulated. Half a pound of butter is two sticks, 8 oz.
- Half a tea-cup of milkTea-cup measures varied and were generally smaller than a modern measuring cup; read this as roughly a third of a cup, and hold some back until you see how the dough is coming together.
- Baking-powderPeriod baking powders were weaker and less reliable than today's double-acting product, so the two are not directly comparable. The dough should be baked reasonably soon after mixing rather than left overnight.
- ShapingDespite the name, these are not dropped. Roll the dough into finger-thick ropes, cut into pieces about the size of a hazelnut, and bake them spaced on a sheet; they spread only a little.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven direction. Around 350F for 10 to 12 minutes, until the bottoms are just colored, suits them. They firm as they cool and are meant to be dry and hard-crisp.
- Where is the pepperMany pepper-nut recipes carry black pepper, cinnamon, cloves, cardamom or anise; this one carries none. If you want the traditional character, a teaspoon of cinnamon with a half teaspoon each of ground cloves and black pepper is in keeping with the type.
- YieldA batch this size runs to roughly 150 to 200 small cookies. Halve it unless you are baking for a crowd or for keeping.
- StoragePepper-nuts keep well; sealed in a tin they hold for weeks, and a slice of apple or bread in the tin is a traditional way of softening them.
Pepper-nuts are the English name for Pfeffernüsse, the small hard spice cookies brought to America by German-speaking immigrants and generally associated with Christmas baking. The "pepper" in the name is usually explained as a general old term for spice rather than black pepper specifically, though many versions do include it. This Nashville contribution, appearing in a community cookbook like The Dixie Cook Book in the 1880s, has dropped the spices altogether, leaving a plain, keeping-quality sugar cookie. The recipe's form is equally characteristic of the genre — a list of proportions signed by the contributor, with the shaping, oven and timing left to a cook who was assumed already to know.