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Drop Cookies
Mrs. J. D. Odell.
Two cups of sugar, one cup of milk, half cup of butter, three-quarters cup of flour, two teaspoonsfuls Cook's Friend baking powder, two eggs.
A terse contributor's list with no method, no oven and no flour that could possibly hold it together. The proportions are the first thing to sort out.
- The flour is wrong as printedThe flour looks far too low as printed -- two cups of sugar, a cup of milk and two eggs against three-quarters of a cup of flour gives a thin pouring batter, not a dough that can be dropped. Whether the figure is a compositor's error or a mis-set fraction cannot be established from the text; expect to need considerably more, somewhere in the region of 4 to 5 cups, to reach a stiff drop batter. This is an ambiguity in the source, not a conversion problem.
- Cook's Friend baking powderA Canadian brand of the period, and a baking powder under that name is still sold in Canada. Substitute ordinary double-acting baking powder measure for measure.
- Method, which the recipe omitsCream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, then add the milk alternately with the flour and baking powder sifted together. Overworking after the flour goes in toughens the cookie.
- OvenThe original gives none. Drop cookies of this type want 375F, on the middle rack, until the edges are set and just colouring.
- Dropping and spacingA rounded tablespoon per cookie, two inches apart on a lined sheet. The batter spreads more than a modern stiff dough would, so err on the generous side of spacing.
- TimingEight to twelve minutes depending on size. These are cake-like rather than crisp and go dry quickly; pull them while the centres still look slightly soft.
- FlavouringNothing is specified. A teaspoon of vanilla, a grating of nutmeg, or lemon zest all suit the base, as does a cup of currants or chopped raisins stirred in at the end.
- YieldRoughly three to four dozen tablespoon-sized cookies with the flour brought up to workable proportions.
The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877) was compiled from contributions by "ladies of Toronto and other cities and towns" and sold to raise money for the Hospital for Sick Children, one of the earliest and most successful charity cookbooks in Canada. Mrs. Odell lists ingredients and nothing else: the method was assumed, and so was the reader's judgement about how much flour a batter needed. The mention of Cook's Friend baking powder by brand sits alongside the advertising the book carried, and named products turn up throughout the text. Chemical leavening, though by then some decades old, was still finding its place in the domestic kitchen, and naming a trusted brand reassured cooks who had grown up with saleratus and sour milk.