Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › Cookies (II)
Cookies (II)
Mrs. W. Baird.
One cup of sugar, one of butter, two eggs, spices to taste, two tablespoons of milk, one teaspoon of soda and half of cream of tartar; beat all together with flour enough to roll out thin.
A rolled spice cookie with no oven temperature, no baking time and no flour quantity — typical of a recipe copied from one cook's memory. The proportions are sound; the gaps are yours to fill.
- Flour, in numbers"Flour enough to roll out thin" works out to roughly 3 to 3 1/2 cups for this amount of fat and sugar. Add it a cup at a time until the dough is stiff enough to hold a rolled sheet without sticking, then chill it for half an hour before rolling — cold dough rolls thin without tearing.
- OvenBake at 375F for 8 to 10 minutes, until the edges are just colored. Thin rolled cookies go from pale to burnt in under a minute, so watch the first tray and time the rest by it.
- The leavening is upside downA teaspoon of soda with only half a teaspoon of cream of tartar leaves excess soda, which tastes soapy and metallic. The usual pairing is two parts cream of tartar to one part soda; if you want to stay close to the original, use 1 teaspoon cream of tartar to 1/2 teaspoon soda, or substitute 2 teaspoons baking powder.
- "Spices to taste"Cinnamon, with nutmeg or mace and sometimes clove, are the spices that turn up most often in cookies of this period; about 1 1/2 teaspoons total suits a batch this size.
- ButterNineteenth-century butter was often heavily salted for keeping, and its water content varied. Use softened unsalted butter and add 1/4 teaspoon salt, which the recipe omits entirely.
- Creaming"Beat all together" understates it. Cream the butter and sugar until pale and light, then beat in the eggs and milk before the flour goes in.
- YieldSeveral dozen cookies cut at 2 1/2 inches, depending on how thin the dough is rolled. They keep well in a tin.
Cookie recipes of this type -- sugar, butter, eggs, a little milk, and flour enough to roll -- fill the baking chapters of late nineteenth-century North American community cookbooks, usually credited to the woman who contributed them, as here to Mrs. W. Baird. The Home Cook Book was compiled in that fundraising tradition, where each entry arrived as a household already used it rather than as a tested formula, which may be why quantities like the flour go unstated: the contributor knew the feel of the dough and could assume her reader did too. The soda-and-cream-of-tartar pairing points to the decades when cooks still mixed their own chemical leavening from two separately purchased tins; commercial baking powder was available but not yet universal.