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Maple Cookies
3 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 teaspoonful baking soda 3 tablespoonfuls hot water ½ teaspoonful salt Maple sugar Flour Cream Crisco and sugar together, add egg well beaten, mix well, add cream, salt, soda dissolved in water, and sufficient flour to make of right consistency to drop from spoon. Grate some maple sugar on each cookie and bake in moderate oven eight minutes.
Sufficient for forty cookies.
The ingredient list in this printing is incomplete — sugar, egg, cream, maple sugar and flour all appear in the method with no amounts given — so treat this as a sketch to be filled in rather than a formula to follow.
- Missing quantitiesThe method calls for creaming Crisco with sugar, then adding a beaten egg, cream, and "sufficient flour." None of those amounts is printed. For forty small drop cookies from 3 tablespoons of fat you are looking at roughly a cup of sugar, one egg, a few tablespoons of cream and about two cups of flour, but the book does not say so.
- The salt is almost certainly a misprintThe salt looks high -- 1½ teaspoons in a batch built on 3 tablespoons of fat would taste noticeably salty, and it may be a misprint for ½ teaspoon. With the flour and sugar amounts absent there is no way to know what scale was intended.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350-375°F. Eight minutes is right for a small, thin drop cookie; pull them when the edges have just set and colored.
- CriscoThe all-vegetable shortening sold under the name today is reformulated (no partially hydrogenated oil) but behaves the same way in creaming. Butter can be substituted one for one, with a slightly softer, more spread-prone cookie.
- Baking soda in hot waterDissolving soda in a little hot water was a common instruction in recipes of this period. Add it near the end and get the trays into the oven promptly.
- Maple sugarHard cake or block maple sugar, which grates to a coarse powder. Granulated maple sugar can be substituted, and maple flakes or a light sprinkle of crumbled maple candy do the same job. Maple syrup will not — it dissolves and soaks in rather than sitting on top.
- CreamPeriod recipes call for cream without specifying richness, and it ranged from thin to thick. Whole milk works but gives a drier cookie.
- YieldForty cookies means teaspoon-sized drops, spaced well apart. Larger drops will need a minute or two more and the maple topping will begin to scorch, so watch the first tray.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to introduce cooks to what is generally described as the first widely marketed hydrogenated vegetable shortening, and its recipes exist chiefly to show that Crisco could stand in for butter and lard anywhere a household already used them. The page has an odd shape: the shortening gets a precise measurement while the sugar, egg, cream and flour are left blank. Maple sugar grated over the top finishes the cookie.