Home › Pastry and Cookies › Peanut Cookies
Peanut Cookies
2 tablespoons fat. 1 cup sugar. 2 eggs well-beaten. 2 cups flour. 1/2 teaspoon salt. 1/4 cup milk. 2 teaspoons baking powder teaspoon salt cup milk 1 cup chopped peanuts teaspoon lemon juice Cream the fat, add sugar gradually, add well-beaten egg. Mix and sift baking powder, salt and flour; add to first mixture. Then add milk, peanuts and lemon juice. Drop from tip of a spoon on a greased pan 1 inch apart. Place 1/2 peanut on top of each. Bake 12 to 15 minutes in a slow oven. 1/2 teaspoon lemon juice.
A plain drop cookie from the era when peanuts were cheap, plentiful and thought of as a novelty in baking. The method is sound; the quantities as printed need judgement.
- Slow ovenA slow oven here means 300-325F. At that temperature a small drop cookie dries and colours gently rather than spreading and browning at the edge, which is what the 12 to 15 minutes assumes.
- Incomplete ingredient listThe list gives baking powder, salt, milk, peanuts and lemon juice but not the quantities of fat, sugar, egg or flour that the method calls for. Any cook working from this page will need to take proportions from a comparable drop cookie: roughly 1/2 cup fat, 1 cup sugar, 1 egg and about 2 cups flour for the cup of nuts given here.
- Missing fractionsSeveral measures have lost their fractions in printing. Read the salt as 1/2 teaspoon, the milk as about 1/2 cup, and the lemon juice as 1/2 to 1 teaspoon; the lemon is there for flavour lift only, not for leavening.
- The fat"The fat" may mean butter, lard, shortening or a butter substitute; the page does not say. Butter gives better flavour and more spread; shortening holds its shape better and gives a softer, more cake-like crumb.
- PeanutsUse roasted unsalted peanuts and chop them coarsely by hand. Salted cocktail peanuts will overwhelm the small quantity of salt in the batter, and machine-chopped nuts turn to paste and grease the dough.
- SpacingOne inch apart is tight for a batter loosened with milk. Two inches is safer unless the dough is stiff enough to hold a mound.
- YieldWith the proportions above, expect roughly three to four dozen small cookies.
Peanut cookies belong to a burst of peanut cookery that ran through American cookbooks from the 1890s into the 1920s, as Southern peanut acreage expanded and the roasted nut moved from street vendors' carts into home kitchens and factory-made peanut butter. Promotional and utility cookbooks of the period -- of which the metropolitan-style household books are a good example -- pushed the peanut hard as a cheap source of protein and fat, and it turns up in soups, croquettes, loaves and sweets alike. The dash of lemon juice is also characteristic; nineteenth-century bakers used a few drops of acid to sharpen an otherwise flat, fatty sweetness long before vanilla extract became universal in cheap baking.