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White Cookies
2 cupfuls sugar 1 cupful Crisco 1 teaspoonful baking soda 1 teaspoonful salt 1 teaspoonful vanilla extract ½ teaspoonful lemon extract Flour ½ cupful thick sour milk 2 eggs Cream Crisco and sugar together, add eggs well beaten, soda mixed with sour milk, salt, extracts, and about 5 cupfuls flour. Roll very thin, cut with cookie cutter, lay on Criscoed tins, bake in moderately hot oven five minutes. To keep any length of time, when cold, place in covered tin cans and set in cool place, and they will be as crisp as when first baked. Sufficient for ninety cookies. 2 lbs.
The text as printed is defective: the opening quantities of Crisco and sugar have dropped out, and a second, unrelated ingredient list (flour, Crisco, milk, yeast, sugar — clearly the start of a bread or coffee cake) has been pulled in at the end. What follows treats the cookie method as the recipe and flags what is genuinely missing.
- The missing quantitiesNo amount is given for the Crisco or the sugar, and the printed "1½ cupful thick sour milk" is the only liquid figure we can trust. For a dough taking 5 cups of flour and 90 thin cookies, roughly a cup of fat and a cup and a half to two cups of sugar is the plausible range, but this is inference, not what the book says.
- The trailing listThe final six lines — 2 lbs flour, ¾ cupful Crisco, salt, 2 cupfuls milk, a yeast cake, 1 cupful sugar — have nothing to do with these cookies. No yeast belongs in a soda-and-sour-milk dough. Ignore them.
- CriscoStill sold, and the same idea of a product, though reformulated since 1913 to remove partially hydrogenated oil. Any solid vegetable shortening behaves the same way here; butter will give a softer, more spreading cookie.
- Thick sour milkNot spoiled milk but clabbered raw milk, acidic and about the consistency of loose yogurt. Cultured buttermilk is the direct substitute; failing that, whole milk with a tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice per cup, left to stand ten minutes.
- Why the soda goes into the milkThe teaspoon of soda is mixed with the sour milk rather than the flour so it reacts with the acid immediately. Get the dough onto the tins reasonably promptly — the lift is spent early.
- "Moderately hot oven"375–400F. Five minutes is right only if the dough is rolled genuinely thin, an eighth of an inch or less; watch for pale gold at the edges rather than trusting the clock.
- Flour by feel"About 5 cupfuls" is an approximation, and the amount actually needed will vary with the milk. Add until the dough is stiff enough to roll thin without sticking, and chill it if it fights you.
- Yield and keepingNinety cookies at the thinness intended, so expect fewer if you roll heavier. The tin-can storage advice is sound: these are a dry, crisp cookie and go soft in humid air, so an airtight container is not optional.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to teach cooks what to do with a new product — hydrogenated cottonseed oil, sold as a shortening that did not smoke like lard and kept without refrigeration. The book's strategy is visible in this recipe: it is an ordinary sour-milk rolled cookie of a kind that appeared in American manuscript and community cookbooks throughout the nineteenth century, rewritten so that the fat is Crisco and the baking sheets are "Criscoed" rather than greased, the brand name used as a verb. "White cookies" simply distinguishes them from darker molasses or spice cookies; they are pale because they carry no brown sugar, molasses, or egg yolk-heavy enrichment, and the flavor comes entirely from vanilla and lemon extract. The advice to store them in covered tin cans in a cool place reflects a period before household refrigeration, when a large batch of thin, dry cookies was a practical way to keep something sweet on hand for weeks.