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Cookies
Mrs. G. Wyllie.
One cup of butter, one cup of brown sugar, one teaspoon of soda, three eggs, flour enough to roll out thin.
A four-line rolled cookie of the kind every subscription cookbook carried, written for a cook who already knew what cookie dough should feel like. The gaps are assumed knowledge, not omissions.
- Flour, quantified"Flour enough to roll out thin" is a matter of feel; for this amount of butter, sugar and egg expect somewhere in the region of 3 1/2 to 4 cups. Add it in stages and stop when the dough holds together and pulls cleanly from the bowl; more flour than that gives a hard, dry cookie.
- Soda without acidA teaspoon of soda here has only the brown sugar's mild acidity to react with, so expect modest lift and a faint alkaline tang that reads as butterscotch. Sift or dissolve the soda in a spoonful of water first — undispersed soda leaves bitter yellow flecks.
- Butter and sugarButter of the period was commonly salted for keeping; use salted butter, or add 1/2 teaspoon salt to unsalted. Brown sugar of the period was moister and less refined than today's light brown, which is the closest match.
- Chill before rollingThree eggs to one cup of butter makes a slack dough that will fight a rolling pin at room temperature. An hour in the refrigerator, rolled between sheets of parchment, is what makes "thin" achievable.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven direction. For thin rolled cookies, 375F works: bake 7 to 9 minutes, until the edges just colour — they firm considerably as they cool.
- Flavouring is left to youNo spice, zest or extract is specified. A teaspoon of vanilla or 1/2 teaspoon grated nutmeg suits the brown sugar.
- YieldSeveral dozen; at 2 1/2 inches and rolled genuinely thin, upwards of five dozen. Cut with a plain round or a fluted cutter and bake on an ungreased sheet; this dough carries enough butter not to stick.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto in the 1870s by "ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada" and sold in aid of the Hospital for Sick Children — one of the earliest and most successful Canadian examples of the charitable subscription cookbook, a form that had taken hold in North America after the Civil War fundraising fairs. Its method explains the terseness here: recipes were donated by name, printed close to as received, and Mrs. G. Wyllie was writing for readers who shared her assumptions about dough and oven heat. The word cookie itself is generally traced to Dutch koekje, "little cake," and its ordinary use in a Canadian book of this date marks the North American vocabulary already parting company with the British "biscuit." The odd running head, "Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen," belongs to one of the humorous filler essays the compilers scattered through the pages, not to the recipe.