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Cookies
One cupful of butter, two cupfuls of sugar; break two eggs in teacup and fill cup up with cold water and add to butter and sugar; add half teaspoon of soda sifted in flour; mix very soft, roll out thin; sprinkle sugar on top.
A plain rolled sugar cookie of the sort kept in a stone jar and cut with a tumbler. The original gives no flour quantity, no oven heat and no time, so the cook is expected to supply all three.
- The egg-and-water cupBreak two eggs into a teacup and top it up with cold water. Teacup measures varied, roughly 4 to 6 fl oz, so once the two eggs are in, the water amounts to only a few tablespoons. This is the whole added liquid for the batch, and it is why the dough comes together soft.
- Flour is unmeasured on purpose"Mix very soft" means add flour only until the dough just stops sticking, which lands somewhere near 4 to 4 1/2 cups. Err on the slack side; extra flour is the difference between a crisp thin cookie and a dry one.
- Chill before rollingA cupful of butter in a soft dough is unrollable at room temperature. An hour in the refrigerator, then roll a quarter of the batch at a time on a lightly floured board to about 1/8 inch.
- Oven heatNothing is stated. Thin sugar cookies of this type want a moderately quick oven, 375F, for 7 to 10 minutes, until the edges are just brown. They scorch quickly at the rim once colour starts.
- Soda with nothing to react onHalf a teaspoon of soda in this much flour, with no sour milk, molasses or cream of tartar, does almost no lifting; it mainly encourages browning and a faint alkaline tang. Sifting it thoroughly through the flour, as directed, matters so no pocket of it lands in one cookie.
- The sugar on topSprinkle granulated sugar over the rolled sheet and pass the pin over it once so it beds in, then cut. Sugar scattered on the cut rounds mostly falls off in the pan.
- FlavouringThe recipe calls for none. A grating of nutmeg, a teaspoon of vanilla, or lemon zest all sit comfortably in it.
- YieldSeveral dozen cookies at 2 1/2 inches, rolled thin, depending entirely on how much flour goes in and how thin they are rolled. The dough keeps several days wrapped and chilled if you would rather bake in batches.
Rolled sugar cookies like this one are a staple of American home baking from the mid-nineteenth century onward, and their form is dictated by the cupful rather than the scale: butter, sugar, eggs and "flour to make a soft dough" could be recited from memory without a book. Breaking the eggs into a teacup and filling the cup with water is a measuring shortcut of the same kind, keeping the total volume of liquid roughly constant whatever the size of the eggs. The reliance on saleratus or soda even where there was no acid for it to work against is a holdover from the decades before commercial baking powder became the default leaven.