Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › Sugar Cookies
Sugar Cookies
Mrs. W. A. C.
One and a-half cups of sugar, one of butter, two eggs, half a cup of sour cream, one teaspoon of soda; mix just so that you can roll out; then sprinkle with sugar just before putting in oven ; bake quick.
A typical contributed receipt: the proportions are given, the flour is not, and the baking instruction is a single word. Everything hinges on rolling the dough thick enough to hold together and baking it fast.
- The missing flourNo quantity is given because the cook was expected to judge by feel — "mix just so that you can roll out." With 1½ cups sugar, 1 cup butter, 2 eggs and ½ cup sour cream, that lands somewhere around 3½ to 4 cups of flour, but the original is genuinely silent and the dough should be judged by handling, not by a number.
- "Bake quick"The receipt gives no oven setting and the book supplies no scale; a hot oven, in modern terms roughly 400–425F, is the usual reading. For a butter-and-sugar dough rolled thin that means only a few minutes — watch closely, and take them out when the edges have just coloured and the centres are still pale.
- Soda and sour creamThe teaspoon of soda is there to react with the acid in the sour cream rather than to leaven on its own. Commercial sour cream today is standardised and thicker than home-soured farm cream is likely to have been, though period cream varied; a full-fat cultured sour cream, or crème fraîche thinned with buttermilk, is the nearest substitute. If the raw dough tastes soapy, scant the soda.
- ButterOne cup is two sticks, 8 oz. Period butter was often salted and hand-churned with variable water content; if using unsalted, add ½ teaspoon salt, which the receipt omits entirely.
- Chill before rollingThe dough is soft and will fight a rolling pin at room temperature. An hour in the refrigerator makes it manageable and keeps the cookies from spreading in a hot oven. Roll about ¼ inch thick — much thinner and they will scorch.
- The sugar on topSprinkle just before baking, as directed, and press it in lightly with the pin or your palm so it fuses rather than rolls off. A coarse or sanding sugar stays visible on the surface.
- YieldSince the flour is unmeasured the yield can only be approximate: expect somewhere in the region of four to five dozen 2½-inch cookies. They keep about a week in a tin and firm up after the first day.
The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877) was one of the first Canadian community cookbooks, assembled from receipts sent in by named and initialled contributors — hence "Mrs. W. A. C." — and sold in aid of the Hospital for Sick Children. Sugar cookies of this type, leavened with soda against sour cream rather than with baking powder, belong to the farm-dairy kitchen: sour cream was a by-product any household with a cow had on hand, and pairing it with saleratus or soda was the standard cheap lift before commercial baking powders became universal in the 1870s and 80s. The vagueness is not carelessness but convention; contributed receipts of this era assumed a reader who knew what a rollable dough felt like and could read her own stove, and flour quantities often go unstated.