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Soft Cookies Lemon
One cupful butter, one and one-half cupfuls of sugar, three tablespoonfuls of sour milk, one teaspoonful soda, one-half of a lemon, juice and grated rind. As little flour as will roll them out; two well beaten eggs. Let stand three or four hours on ice. Then bake in a quick oven. Do not roll too thin.
A rolled lemon cookie with almost no liquid in it, which makes the flour amount the whole problem: the dough is meant to be as soft as you can manage and still lift it off the board.
- "As little flour as will roll them out"Expect somewhere around 3 to 3 1/2 cups for this quantity of butter, sugar and eggs, added a half cup at a time until the dough just stops sticking to your hands. Every extra spoonful past that point trades softness for a cracker.
- Sour milkUse buttermilk, or milk soured with a few drops of lemon juice or vinegar. It is here to react with the soda; together with the two eggs and the lemon juice it is nearly all the moisture the dough gets.
- Soda, not powderA full teaspoon of baking soda is likely more than three tablespoons of sour milk and the juice of half a lemon can neutralise, and that leftover alkalinity probably helps them brown and spread. Sift or dissolve it thoroughly or you will bite into a bitter, soapy pocket.
- "On ice"The refrigerator. Three or four hours is a real requirement, not a suggestion, because a dough this soft cannot be rolled warm. Overnight is fine.
- Half a lemonAbout 1 1/2 tablespoons of juice and a rounded teaspoon of grated zest. Grate the rind into the sugar before creaming so the oils are drawn out.
- A quick oven425F, dropping to 400F if they colour too fast. These want a short, hot bake of 6 to 8 minutes, out while the centres still look slightly underdone; that is what keeps them soft as they cool.
- Thickness"Do not roll too thin" means a good 1/4 inch, closer to 3/8 for a genuinely cakey cookie. Roll on a well-floured cloth and work with a portion of the dough at a time, keeping the rest cold.
- YieldRoughly 4 dozen at a 2 1/2-inch cutter. They keep two or three days in a tin and stale quickly after that, being butter-rich and low in liquid.
Soft rolled cookies like this one belong to the era before commercial baking powder had entirely displaced the sour milk and soda pair, a combination that let farm and village kitchens leaven with what was already on hand: milk that had turned in the crock, and a paper of soda from the store. The sourness also cut the richness of a full cup of butter. "Cookie" itself comes into American English from the Dutch koekje, a little cake, and by the late nineteenth century it covered everything from thin rolled wafers to the soft, thick, lemon-scented sort. Lemon may well have appealed to cooks who wanted something brighter than nutmeg or caraway without the cost of vanilla extract, which was still expensive and often adulterated; half a lemon, rind and all, cost little and gave the whole batch its character.