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Cookies (III)
Mrs. Stotesbury.
Two eggs, one cup of butter, one of sugar, half teaspoonful of soda, and flour enough to make a dough; roll thin and bake quickly.
A contributed recipe of the terse kind, written for a cook who already knew what cookie dough should feel like. The two things it leaves out are the flour quantity and any flavouring.
- Flour "enough to make a dough"With two eggs, a cup of butter and a cup of sugar, expect roughly 3 to 3 1/2 cups (about 400-450 g) of all-purpose flour. Add it in stages and stop when the dough just holds together and no longer sticks to the fingers; extra flour is what makes rolled cookies hard.
- A cup of butterThat is 8 oz, two modern sticks, 225 g. Nineteenth-century butter was often salted and sometimes quite heavily so; if you use unsalted, add 1/2 teaspoon of salt, which the original assumes rather than lists.
- Soda with nothing to react withHalf a teaspoon of soda has no acid here beyond whatever was in the period's butter or a splash of sour milk. Substituting 1 1/2 teaspoons of baking powder gives the intended slight lift without the faintly soapy taste soda alone can leave.
- "Bake quickly"The recipe asks for speed rather than naming a "quick oven", a term period sources place loosely somewhere in the 400-450F range. For thin rolled cookies, 400-425F for 6 to 8 minutes is the practical reading: they should be set and just colouring at the edges, and they will crisp as they cool.
- Roll thinAbout 1/8 inch. Chill the dough at least an hour first, since a dough this rich smears when rolled warm. Work with a quarter of it at a time and keep the rest cold.
- FlavouringThe recipe gives none. A teaspoon of vanilla, the grated zest of a lemon, or a little nutmeg is entirely in keeping if you want more than butter and sugar.
- MethodCream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, then the soda sifted with the flour. Creaming is implied, not stated, and skipping it gives a greasy, dense cookie.
- YieldSeveral dozen 2-inch cookies, depending how thin they are rolled; a batch this size can easily run well past six dozen. They keep in a tin for a week or so.
The Home Cook Book (first published in Chicago in the mid-1870s and reissued in Toronto, where it became one of the earliest widely circulated Canadian cookbooks) was compiled from recipes contributed by named local women, which is why this one carries Mrs. Stotesbury's name and almost nothing else. The compilers printed what was sent to them, and what was sent was shorthand between experienced cooks: quantities for the expensive things, silence on the flour. The word cookie itself comes from the Dutch koekje, little cake, and entered American English through New York; British books of the same decade would generally have filed this under biscuits. More than one recipe titled simply "Cookies" appears in the book, an indication of how routine the form was in a household baking week.