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Cream Cookies
One cupful of thick sour cream, one cupful sugar, one egg, one teaspoonful soda, one tablespoonful of butter; mix soft.
A rolled-cookie dough of the kind written for cooks who already knew what a soft dough felt like. The flour is not listed at all, which is the whole difficulty of the recipe.
- The missing flour"Mix soft" means add flour until you have a dough just firm enough to roll — with this much liquid that lands around 2½ to 3 cups, worked in gradually. Stop while the dough is still tacky; a stiff dough gives hard, dry cookies.
- Thick sour creamThe original means old-fashioned soured cream, heavy and tart, whose acid is what activates the soda. Modern full-fat cultured sour cream is the right substitute. Reduced-fat or non-cultured "sour" cream made by adding vinegar to sweet cream will not give the same tenderness.
- Soda, not baking powderA teaspoon of soda to a cup of cream relies on the cream's acid to neutralise it. If your sour cream is mild, cut the soda to ¾ teaspoon or the cookies may taste soapy and darken.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given in the recipe. Bake at about 375°F for 8 to 10 minutes, until the edges just colour. The tops stay pale.
- Handling the doughChill the dough an hour before rolling; sour-cream doughs are slack and sticky at room temperature. Roll to about ¼ inch, flour the board lightly, and cut without rerolling scraps more than once.
- FlavouringThe recipe is plain as written. Vanilla, a grating of nutmeg, or a little lemon zest are common additions in comparable cream-cookie recipes, as is a sprinkle of sugar on top before baking.
- YieldAbout three dozen cookies from a 2-inch cutter. They are best the day they are made and soften in a tin.
Sour-cream cookies belong to the era before commercial baking powder settled into every pantry, when the leavening in a farm kitchen was soda plus whatever acid was on hand — sour milk, buttermilk, molasses, or thick cream that had stood a day too long. A soured dairy product was a resource rather than a problem. The recipe's silence about flour is typical of American household cookbooks of the period, which recorded proportions of the expensive or measurable things and left the flour to the cook's hand; "mix soft" was a complete instruction to anyone who had made the dough before.