Rose Leaves
1 cupful sugar 6 tablespoonfuls Crisco 2 eggs 1/4 teaspoonful salt 1 teaspoonful rose extract 2 cupfuls flour Cream Crisco, adding sugar gradually, then stir in eggs well beaten; add salt, extract, and flour. The dough should be soft. Now chill dough, then roll very thin, using sugar instead of flour, to dust rolling-pin and board. Cut out with small fancy cutter. Place on tins greased with Crisco and bake in moderate oven eight or ten minutes or until slightly browned. Sufficient for fifty small cakes. 1 cupful flour
A thin rolled sugar cookie scented with rose, from the Crisco promotional cookbook. The dough is very short and the sugar-dusted rolling surface is the part that makes or breaks it.
- Sugar, not flour, on the boardRolling in granulated sugar keeps the cookies tender and gives a faint crisp shell; flour would toughen them and dull the pale colour. Work with a quarter of the chilled dough at a time and keep the rest cold, since this dough softens fast.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350-375F. At the specified 8 to 10 minutes cookies rolled truly thin will be set with only a faint colour at the edges, which is what "slightly browned" means here.
- Crisco and the measureSix tablespoonfuls is 3/8 cup of vegetable shortening, between a third and a half cup. Modern Crisco has been reformulated to reduce trans fat but behaves much the same in creaming; unsalted butter can be substituted for flavour at the cost of some spread.
- Rose extractA teaspoonful of rose extract is a large amount by current standards. Present-day rose waters and extracts vary enormously in strength, so start with a quarter teaspoon of concentrated rose extract, or use rose water in the full teaspoon quantity and expect a lighter perfume.
- The stray lineThe "1 cupful flour" printed after the instructions appears to be a stray fragment rather than a second addition; the ingredient list specifies 2 cupfuls, so use 2 cups total.
- ChillingAn hour in the refrigerator is the minimum; the dough is described as soft on purpose and cannot be rolled thin until it is genuinely firm. Chill the cut shapes again on the sheet if the kitchen is warm.
- Yield and pansFifty small cookies implies a small cutter; fewer if the cutter is larger. Modern parchment does the work the greased tins were meant to do.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was a cookbook written to sell a product: Procter & Gamble had introduced hydrogenated cottonseed shortening in 1911, and the book's recipes exist to demonstrate that it could replace both butter and lard in every department of cooking, hence the insistence on Crisco for the pans as well as the dough. Rose flavouring in baking is much older than the shortening; rose water was a standard sweet perfume in English and American kitchens from the medieval period onward, and it lingered in cake and cookie recipes well into the nineteenth century before vanilla displaced it. By 1913 concentrated "rose extract" was sold alongside lemon and almond in the bottled-flavouring trade, though whether that is why this recipe calls for extract rather than the older distilled water is a matter of inference. The name is often said simply to describe the result: thin, pale, fancy-cut wafers meant for a tea tray.