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White Cookies
Mrs. J. R. Silliman.
One cup of butter, two cups of sugar, one cup of milk, four eggs, two tablespoonsful caraway seeds; add flour enough to roll, and cut out.
A plain caraway cookie of the sort that filled nineteenth-century stone jars, written in the shorthand of a cook who assumed you already knew what cookie dough should feel like. The recipe gives no leavening, no oven, and no time, so the judgment calls are all yours.
- No leavening is listedMany period versions of a rolled cookie like this call for saleratus (baking soda) or cream of tartar; this one does not. Either the omission is a printer's slip or these were meant to bake flat and crisp. A teaspoon of baking powder gives a softer, more familiar cookie, but it is an addition, not a restoration.
- "Flour enough to roll"With a cup of butter, two of sugar, a cup of milk and four eggs, expect somewhere in the range of 5 to 6 cups of flour before the dough stops sticking. Add it in stages and stop as soon as the dough holds together; the last cup is what turns these tough.
- Chill before rollingThis is the hinge. A dough this rich and this wet will smear rather than roll at room temperature. An hour in the refrigerator lets you roll thin, about a quarter inch, and cut clean edges without working in extra flour.
- Butter and sugar of the periodButter was often salted; if you use unsalted, add half a teaspoon of salt. Period sugar could be coarser than modern granulated, so cream it thoroughly.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven and no time. A hot oven, around 400F for 8 to 10 minutes, works: pull them when the edges just color and the tops are still pale.
- CarawayTwo tablespoons is assertive by current taste and was the whole point of the cookie. Buy the seed fresh; caraway that has sat in a cupboard for two years tastes of dust rather than anise and citrus.
- YieldRoughly five to six dozen two-and-a-half-inch cookies. They keep well in a tin for a week and were made in quantity for exactly that reason.
Caraway was among the familiar cookie spices of the English-speaking kitchen long before cinnamon and vanilla displaced it, carried into American baking through the seed cake and the caraway comfit. "White" here is a color description, and it may also have read as a claim of quality: made with white sugar and white flour rather than molasses and a coarser grind, and baked pale so the flour showed clean. The Home Cook Book, generally said to have been first issued in Chicago in the 1870s and reprinted in Toronto, was compiled from contributions by named local women, and this entry keeps Mrs. J. R. Silliman's own compression intact, including the assumption that any reader could tell by hand when the dough had taken flour enough. Recipes like it were currency between households; the name attached to each one was both a credit and a small guarantee.