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Sugar Cookies
One cupful of sugar, one-half cupful of butter, one cupful of sour cream, one egg, one teaspoonful of soda, a little salt, also seed if desired. Mix soft as can be handled; sprinkle sugar on top just before putting in the oven. Let stand on ice one hour before baking.
A typical late-Victorian drop-and-roll cookie recipe: it assumes you know how much flour a soft dough wants and how hot your oven runs. Two things are missing outright, and both are worth settling before you start.
- No flour is listed"Mix soft as can be handled" is the whole instruction. Expect roughly 2 1/2 to 3 cups of all-purpose flour for this quantity of liquid, added a half cup at a time until the dough just holds together and is still tacky. Err on the soft side; the hour of chilling firms it enough to roll.
- No oven temperatureBake at 375F for 8 to 10 minutes, until the edges are set and barely coloured. These are thin, sugar-topped cookies and they scorch on the bottom quickly.
- "Seed" means caraway"Seed" most often means caraway -- in American cookbooks of this period an unqualified "seed" in a sweet dough is usually caraway, the common flavouring for a plain seed cake or cookie. A teaspoon is plenty. Nutmeg or lemon zest are period-appropriate alternatives if caraway is not to your taste.
- Sour cream then and nowThe sour cream of this period was generally cream left to sour naturally: thinner and tangier than the stabilised commercial product. Full-fat sour cream works; low-fat and light versions add water and slacken the dough. Full-fat plain yogurt is a reasonable stand-in.
- Soda, not baking powderThe teaspoon of soda is there to react with the acid in the sour cream, and the quantity is on the generous side for one cup. Level the spoon carefully. Too much soda leaves a soapy taste and browns the cookies unevenly.
- "Let stand on ice"An icebox instruction: refrigerate the dough one hour. This is not optional flourish. A butter-and-cream dough this soft is unrollable warm, and chilling may also slow what is left of the soda's reaction.
- The sugar on topSprinkle coarse or granulated sugar over the cut cookies just before they go in, as directed. Doing it earlier draws moisture and the sugar dissolves into a sticky glaze instead of staying crisp.
- YieldRolled about 1/4 inch thick and cut with a 2 1/2-inch cutter, this makes somewhere between three and five dozen, depending on how much flour the dough takes.
Sour-cream cookies belong to the farm kitchen, where cream that had turned was an asset rather than a loss and soda was the cheapest leavening on the shelf. The pairing is chemical housekeeping: the acid in the soured cream neutralises the soda, giving lift and a tender crumb. Recipes of this kind ran through American community and household cookbooks from the mid-nineteenth century onward, and they are often written this loosely, with no flour weight and no oven setting, because the cook was expected to judge both by feel and by the behaviour of her own range. The optional "seed" points back further still, to the English caraway seed cake, which was standard in plain baking on both sides of the Atlantic long before vanilla became the default sweet flavouring in American kitchens.