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E. S. P
One egg, one cup sugar, one-half cup of butter, onehalf cup milk, one teaspoon cream of tartar, one-half of soda, flour enough to make a stiff dough; drop on tins and sprinkle over with powdered sugar, Bake in a quick oven.
A plain drop cookie of the sort that filled Victorian cake tins: sweet, short, and leavened with the cream of tartar and soda pair that preceded commercial baking powder. The vague "flour enough" is the only real puzzle.
- Quick ovenGenerally read as somewhere around 400-425F. These are small, sugar-topped cookies that want to set fast, so err on the hot side rather than baking them slowly.
- "Flour enough to make a stiff dough"With one egg, one cup sugar, half a cup butter and half a cup milk, expect roughly 2 1/2 to 3 cups of flour. Stop when the dough holds a mound on the spoon rather than slumping; more flour than that gives a hard, biscuit-like cookie.
- Soda measure"One-half of soda" means half a teaspoon, matching the teaspoon of cream of tartar in the standard 2:1 ratio. Together they are roughly the equivalent of 1 1/2 to 2 teaspoons of modern baking powder.
- Cream of tartar and sodaThese react as soon as the milk wets them, so mix the dry leaveners into the flour, combine quickly, and get the tray into the oven. Dough left standing loses most of its lift.
- ButterThe recipe calls for no salt at all. Use unsalted butter and add a pinch of salt if you want it, or use salted butter as it comes.
- Dropping and spacingTeaspoon-sized mounds, two inches apart on a lined sheet. Sprinkle the powdered sugar over the mounds after dropping, as the recipe directs.
- Timing and yieldSix to nine minutes at that heat, out when the edges are just brown. Expect about three dozen small cookies.
Cookies like this one are the workhorses of American community cookbooks from the 1870s onward: one egg, a cup of sugar, and whatever flour the cook's hand told her was right. The cream of tartar and soda combination dates the recipe fairly precisely to the era before packaged baking powder had displaced homemade leavening, when a cook bought the two components separately and measured the acid and the alkali herself. Recipes like this one were compiled from contributed receipts, which is why the instructions assume so much: the contributor, identified here only by the initials "E. S. P.", knew what a stiff dough felt like and saw no reason to describe it.