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Sand Tarts
Two cups sugar, one of butter, three of flour, two eggs, leaving out the white of one; roll out thin and cut in square cakes with a knife; spread the white of egg on top, sprinkle with cinnamon and sugar, and press a blanched almond or raisin in the center.-Miss Clara G. Phellis.
A plain rolled butter cookie with no leavening and no liquid beyond the eggs. Everything depends on how thin you roll it and how briefly you bake it.
- Roll it genuinely thinThe recipe says only "roll out thin," and sand tarts are meant to be crisp and short, so an eighth of an inch or thinner. Rolled thicker, the high proportion of sugar and butter tends toward a softer cookie rather than the sandy snap the name promises.
- Chill the dough firstTwo cups sugar, one cup butter and three cups flour with two eggs makes a soft, greasy dough that will fight a rolling pin at room temperature. Two hours in the refrigerator, then roll a portion at a time, keeping the rest cold.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none. A moderate oven, 350F, for 8 to 10 minutes is right; pull them when the edges are just brown. At this thinness they go from pale to burnt in under a minute.
- The reserved whiteThe white left out of the dough is the glaze. Beat it slack with a fork, or with a teaspoon of water, and brush it thin. Applied straight from the shell it puddles and bakes into a leathery skin.
- Cinnamon sugarNo proportion is given. Roughly a teaspoon of cinnamon to a quarter cup of sugar works, sprinkled while the white is still wet so it grips.
- Blanched almondsWhole blanched almonds are sold ready to use; if you only have skin-on, drop them in boiling water for a minute and slip the skins off. Halved almonds sit flatter on a thin cookie and are less likely to roll off.
- CuttingThe recipe cuts with a knife rather than a cutter, which leaves no scraps to re-roll. Score the sheet into squares of about two inches and lift them onto the pan.
- YieldA large batch: well over six dozen two-inch squares, depending how thin you roll. They keep in a tin and are traditionally made in quantity for the holidays.
Sand tarts are associated with the Pennsylvania German kitchen, and the name is often linked to German baking terms for a dry, sandy crumb -- though that derivation is traditional rather than documented. They belong to the family of thin rolled Christmas cookies kept by German-speaking settlers in Pennsylvania and Maryland, and by the late nineteenth century recipes for them appear well outside those communities. The credit to a named contributor is typical of how community compilations worked: a local woman submitted the version her household made, missing oven temperature and all.