Vintage Recipe: Chocolate Drop Cookies

Valentine's Day was one of Meme's (pronounced with long "e" sounds) favorite holidays.  I mention her in the biographical information on the left because she was largely responsible for my early fascination with woodburning cookstoves.  Meme was a great-great-aunt on my mother's side, and as she had no children of her own, she was very close to our family.  She and I spent a lot of time together--much of it baking--and she would continually reminisce about cooking on a woodburning cookstove.

The 1920s Monarch range which had been her family's second wood cookstove rested in the washhouse on the farm where my cousin makes his home now.  Fortunately, it had been removed from the beautiful farmhouse in 1948 because the house burned to the ground in 1962.  As that farmstead with the gaping basements used to be a favorite picnic spot for us, I would always go into the washhouse and take a look at that beautiful stove.  I can remember one time when all of my mother's family, including Meme, had a cleanup day at the "other place," and my uncle convinced Meme to give us a little tutorial about how she used to cook on that great range.

On our farm a row of cedar trees used to separate the two houses, the southernmost four standing in a perfect square, and I can remember that when I was five, I drew plans in red crayon for a summer kitchen to be built using those four cedars as the corners.  My idea was that the Monarch range could be moved to our place.  I can remember pitching the idea to Granny, who listened with amusement but obviously had no intention of making these dreams a reality.  

So, during those early years I had to be content just pretending to cook on a woodburning cookstove while playing with the toy cookstove that Meme had in the spare bedroom of her apartment.  You can see an identical toy at this post: The Stove That Started It All.  I suppose that I was in junior high or early high school when Meme began to realize that my desire to cook on a real woodburning cookstove was more than just a passing fancy.  I remember that we were in her apartment kitchen watching a pot on the back burner of her Hotpoint electric stove when she started back-pedaling on her romanticism of the woodburning range.

"Oh, you don't really want an old cookstove," I recall her saying.  I protested, and she said, "You have to haul all the fuel in and the ashes out, and then there are some days where maybe it rains and then you can't get the fire to go at all." (My grandfather later explained the set up of the kitchen chimney in the house that burned, and I'm not at all surprised that they had trouble getting a fire lit on rainy days.  I've never had such a problem.)  However, her years of waxing poetic about the woodburning cookstove had made their mark.

If Meme were alive today, she would shake her head and be a little embarrassed to think that she had anything to do with my affinity for wood cookstoves.  But the reality is that her influence on me was and is far greater than just that.  I won't take the time and space to talk further about all of that here, but I will say that one of the areas of influence Meme had was on my chocolate preferences.  Meme was a chocolate aficionado, even though I'm sure she'd never heard the word.  Meme loved chocolate.  Her favorite gifts at Valentine's Day were roses and a box of Russell Stover candies.  Among her meager belongings at the end of her life were further evidence of her love affair with chocolate.  She had used large See's chocolate boxes for storage of various articles, and at the end of this post you will see a vintage Mrs. Steven's candy tin that she used as a cookie can for decades.

Meme was funny about her chocolate, though.  While I never knew her to discriminate between dark or milk chocolate when it came to those many boxes of Russell Stover's, in her own cooking she halved the chocolate in her recipes.  Perhaps this was from motives of economy, I don't know.  Whatever the reason, after a steady diet of lightly chocolated sweets all through my youth, I'm not a fan of dark chocolate, and I prefer baked goods that have had their chocolate content reduced too.  As I write this, it just now dawns on me that perhaps this is the reason I'm not a chocolate cake fan.

The recipe that I'll eventually get around to sharing with you in this post is one of those where Meme always reduced the chocolate.  Sometime in the 1920s, Meme left the farm to attend Iowa State College (later renamed Iowa State University) in Ames, Iowa.  She was nearly thirty years old at the time, and I imagine that after the great romance of her life had dissolved due to religious differences, she thought she ought to be prepared to support herself with a career.  Meme spent only a year at Iowa State and then transferred to Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she completed her Bachelors in dietetics.  

During my own time at ISU, I had an American history class in the auditorium in MacKay Hall, which is the headquarters of the College of Family and Consumer Sciences, and I often wondered which rooms Meme would have spent most of her time in seventy years before I got there.  I could imagine her as one of the women in the historic pictures of cooking classes in that building, standing in stiffly starched aprons over ancient gas hotplates.  I knew about her time at Iowa State because in her kitchen she still had two stacks of recipes that bore the Iowa State College labels.  These stacks were bound by elastic bands from panty hose, but one of the recipes was never with the rest; it was the recipe for Chocolate Drop Cookies.  I have Meme's box of recipes now, so you can see the card in the picture below.  It is hard for me to believe that it is nearly 100 years old today.  Don't try to read the recipe the way it's written because she never followed this, even though you can see that she looked at the recipe many times!

Meme completed the four-year dietetics course in three years, and due to the stress of doing so she suffered what was then called a "nervous breakdown."  She returned to the farm to recover, and events conspired to keep her there until 1947 when she left to make room for my newlywed maternal grandparents.  I'd be willing to bet that several batches of these cookies were baked in that old Monarch wood cookstove in the twenty years between her return from college and her move to Council Bluffs.  I KNOW that oceans of these cookies came out of the oven on the bright new General Electric Airliner range that she had for the thirty years that she lived on Grace Street in the Bluffs, and another large number of them were baked in the aforementioned Hotpoint in her subsequent apartment.  These were truly one of her favorites.

Honestly, they're one of mine too, but I discovered that I hadn't made them since before Nancy and I were married, so it was high time that I introduce her to them!  One last note before we get to the directions: when I spent my two years at Iowa State University in the mid-1990s, I lived in the dorms, and these cookies were still on the menu of the food service system.  You can't imagine how excited I was to see them.  They were served two on a plate, and I knew immediately what they were and was surprised that seventy years later ISU was still using their recipe.  However, when I took my first bite, I was so disappointed.  They didn't taste anything like Meme's because they followed the recipe and used the full amount of chocolate.  They bordered on bitter, in my opinion, but I ate them anyway.

To make these the way Meme did, here is what you'll need:

1 oz. Bakers' unsweetened chocolate

1 cup light brown sugar (the lighter the better)

1/2 cup butter, very soft but not melted

1 egg

1/2 tsp. soda

1 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. vanilla

1/2 cup milk

1 1/2 c. + 2 Tbsp. sifted flour

Here is what you do:

1.  Build your fire so that you will have a moderate oven.

2. Over the coolest part of the cooktop, melt the ounce of unsweetened chocolate.  (Does anyone else miss the individually wrapped one-ounce squares as much as I do?  I have a terrible time getting the new solid bars to break right along the lines.)

The chocolate melting in Meme's old Mirro saucepan
on the far right side of the Margin Gem.

3. While the chocolate is melting, cream the brown sugar and butter.

 

The soft butter and the light brown sugar
being creamed by Meme's 1950 Sunbeam
Mixmaster.  You can tell already that this
recipe doesn't make a large number of cookies.

4. Add the melted chocolate to the sugar and butter mixture.

5. Beat in the egg.  You'll have to scrape the bowl carefully to make sure that any chocolate that stuck to the bottom of the bowl is thoroughly incorporated.

6. Add the baking soda, baking powder, and vanilla.

The measuring spoon you see here was
also Meme's.

7. Add the flour and the milk alternately.

The two measuring cups and the plate
in this picture belonged to Meme.  The
plate is part of a set of Homer Laughlin
Eggshell Theme from the 1940s.

8. Mix all just until well blended.  The dough will feel much more like thick cake batter than cookie dough.

9. Drop by heaping teaspoonfuls onto a lightly greased cookie sheet.  Make sure the cookie sheet is only lightly greased.  You can see in the first picture below that I was too generous with the Crisco.  That is why in the second picture two of the cookies have slid into their neighbors once they were exposed to the heat of the oven.

This is Meme's cookie sheet.  She'd be
so embarrassed if she knew how
"seasoned" I've let it become.

Photographing fire is so difficult!  I wish you could
really see what kind of a fire it takes to keep a
moderate oven.

10. Now, baking these is a little tricky because you can't tell by looking at a chocolate cookie just how brown it is becoming.  Instead, you've got to poke these with your finger.  They are done when they have spread out flat and feel like they have just begun to form a slight crust on the top.  They are overbaked if they feel like they will be crispy.  This should take anywhere from 8-12 minutes depending on how hot your oven is running.  Remember that the end product here is more like a little flat cake than what we usually think of when we think of a chewy or crispy cookie.

11. Remove the cookies from the pan and put them on paper toweling on the countertop to cool.  You'll ruin them if you put them on a cooling rack.  Trust me on this one!

12. Once the cookies are baked, it is time to make the frosting.  If you looked at the recipe above, you know that it came with a frosting recipe, but that was never what Meme did.  Instead, in a small bowl, she would put about three tablespoons of butter, a teaspoon of vanilla, and perhaps a tablespoon or so of Hershey's cocoa.  Add two or three tablespoons of water and stir.

A little more cocoa than I wanted jumped out of
the jar when I poured it in, so my frosting was a
little darker than Meme's.  Oh, and you guessed
it: this is Meme's bowl too.

13. Beat in sufficient powdered sugar to make a thick but spreadable frosting.  Frost the top of each cookie, and don't be too stingy.

Now, you could eat these at this point, but try not to.  Yes, I know that is much easier for me to say than it will be to do!

14. Pack the cookies into an airtight container, using waxed paper to separate the layers so that the frosting doesn't glue them all together.  Let these sit with the lid on overnight.  The next day they will be at their peak, and what a peak it is!

This is the vintage Mrs. Stevens' Candies tin that
Meme always put these cookies in.  It was her widest
tin, so the cookies didn't have to be stacked high,
which would mash them.

Grandma Marian told me once that Meme used to get the lightest brown sugar that she could, and these cookies would have a reddish cast when you bit into them.  I didn't have very light brown sugar, but the batch that you see here did have a slight reddish cast inside them.  If someone can explain that to me, I'd appreciate it.

These were a huge hit with my resident picky eater, and they really aren't difficult to make.  I don't know why it has taken me over seventeen years to make these for Nancy, but I'm not planning on waiting that long again!

Vintage Recipe: Auntie Freda Sieck's Sour Cream Sugar Cookies

This post was requested by one of The Ivers Girls.  The Ivers Girls grew up as neighbors to my maternal grandparents, but to call them simply neighbors or family friends doesn't begin to describe the relationship that our two families share.  For well over fifty years, our lives have intertwined in so many ways that I'm not even able to number them all.  Over that half century, many, many recipes have been exchanged between the two families, so when the youngest of The Ivers Girls mentioned to me earlier this fall that she wished she had my grandma Marian's sugar cookie recipe, I was surprised.

"You mean Grandma never gave that to you?" I asked.

"Whenever I asked about it, all Marian would say was that there was 'nothing special in it,'" she responded.

This is very surprising to me because my Grandma was not one to keep any recipe a secret, especially one like this that she used so frequently.  When I was young, these cookies would show up about once per month from October to April.  In October, they were cut in the shapes of pumpkins and leaves and were frosted with orange tinted icing.  Come November, they appeared in the shapes of turkeys with orange or brown frosting.  Of course, in December they were cut in all sorts of Christmas shapes, and the frosting would be white, pink, and pastel green.  (Grandma didn't believe in darkly colored frosting; she said that you shouldn't have to taste the color.)  In late December, Grandma would make another batch and cut them all into bells to "ring in the new year."  These always had white frosting and usually a cinnamon candy for the clapper.  In February, they appeared as pink frosted hearts; in March, green-frosted shamrocks.  Finally, in April dozens of eggs, crosses, and churches would be cut out.

My mother's favorite story about these cookies is from the Christmas season that was most likely my freshman year of high school.  She had just returned to teaching full-time, and we were extremely busy with activities, too.  Mom had mixed a batch of these and put the dough to chill on our enclosed north porch, which often serves as a walk-in cooler in the winter months.  She always covered the mixer bowl with a luncheon plate, making it easy to access.  As we kids walked in and out of the kitchen door, it was too easy to just lift the plate and grab a bite of cookie dough.  None of that batch of dough actually made it to the oven.  While I would feel terribly irresponsible if I recommended eating cookie dough with raw eggs and flour in it, I will admit that this dough is really good!

My grandma actually sold these cookies for a short time in the 1990s, and while most people associate this recipe with her, she got the recipe from her paternal aunt, and she forever referred to them as Auntie Freda's Sour Cream Cookies--hence the title of this post.  

So, without further ado, here is the big "secret."  Here are the ingredients:

2 cups sugar

1 cup shortening

2 eggs

1 cup sour cream (commercial or country, but not too sour if using country)

1 tsp. soda

2 tsp. vanilla

dash salt

4 1/2 - 5 1/2 cups flour (or more)

And here is the method:

Cream the shortening and sugar.

Beat in the eggs.

Add the sour cream.

Stir in the soda, salt, and vanilla.

Beat well and then begin adding the flour a cup at a time.

Add the flour a cup at a time until you have a dough that 
is not quite stiff enough to roll.  I had just a tad extra sour
cream in this batch because I wanted to finish out the
container, and I had to put in six cups of flour to get the
dough to the right consistency.

Chill the dough for at least two hours; overnight is better.

Now, here is the first real "secret" to getting these to turn out like Grandma Marian's.  When you roll these cookies out, you can choose what you like best.  My mom likes to roll them wafer thin because she likes them thin and crispy.  If you want a really thick cookie, these will work for that too.  However, Grandma always rolled them out to about a quarter of an inch, maybe less.

The next secret to getting them just like Grandma's is in the baking.  These need to be baked in a moderate oven, but here again, the length of time they are baked depends on your personal preference.  Mom likes them best when they are brown all over.  They are good that way, too, but just be aware that the flavor is completely different than if you bake them just until the edges begin to show that they are turning a light brown.  Grandma was adamant about this.  I can still see her standing at her wall oven watching these cookies like a hawk.  As soon as the first hint of brownness began to appear at the edges, she whipped them out of the oven.  Depending on the heat of your oven, eight minutes may even be too long for these cookies to bake.

A word to my fellow wood cookstove users about baking cookies in a woodburning cookstove:

Remember that when you are baking cookies, you'll need to build your fire a little hotter than what you ordinarily would for the desired baking temperature.  Basically, if you need a 350ºF oven, build your fire in whatever way would give you a 375ºF oven.  The reason for this is that with cookie baking, you will be opening the oven door far more frequently than you would if you were baking a pie or a cake, for example, and a wood cookstove oven doesn't recover its heat as quickly as a modern one does.

A sheet of sour cream sugar cookies in the oven of
the Margin Gem cookstove.

Once the cookies have baked, immediately remove them from the cookie sheet to either a cooling rack for crispier cookies or a paper towel-covered countertop for a softer cookie.  You can tell what my preference is by looking below.

Grandma would say that the top and the third cookies
in the stack nearest the bottom of the photograph are baked too long.

The last and biggest secret to getting these cookies to taste exactly like Grandma's is in the frosting.  She would always just mix up a buttercream icing with powdered sugar, butter, water, and vanilla, BUT she would also add just a hint of almond flavoring--not so much that you would be able to immediately identify it, but enough that you can definitely taste it.  This little dab of almond flavoring really sets these cookies off.

Once the frosting has set enough to handle, pack these cookies into airtight containers, putting waxed paper between the layers to prevent the frosting from gluing them all together.  The frosting will soften the cookies over the next few hours, and the end product is deliciously addictive.

I wish I could give you an estimated yield, but I had put this dough out on the aforementioned north porch and did a poor job of resisting the temptation to snitch from it here and there.  Keep in mind, though, that with 5 1/2 cups of flour, this recipe makes a lot of cookies.  Enjoy!

"Prize Egg Yolk Cookies"

When I make from-scratch angel food cakes, I always put at least fourteen egg yolks in some kind of vessel in the refrigerator.  My great-grandmother always made Eleven Egg Yolk Cake, a recipe that I will share here sometime.  Nancy's grandmother always made homemade noodles.  I have done both, but over the summer I found a recipe that I think will become my tradition: Prize Egg Yolk Cookies.

My niece celebrated her 17th birthday on Thanksgiving Day, and she asked for an angel food with caramel frosting (the traditional birthday cake on my mom's side of the family), so I had some egg yolks in the fridge a few weeks ago, and these were soon on the menu.

I found this recipe in the March 1956 edition of the Kitchen Klatter Magazine.  It says there that it was "repeated by request," and I also have this same recipe in a publication put out by Shenandoah, Iowa, radio personality Billie Oakley in the mid-1980s.  Another person put this recipe on food.com from the Billie Oakley publication at this link; however, the flavoring is slightly changed.  No matter where you want to believe that it originated, this is a great way to get rid of extra egg yolks and a delicious cookie recipe.

Here is what you do:

1. Cream one cup of butter and a cup and a half of sugar.

2. Add six egg yolks (or three whole eggs).

3. Beat in one teaspoon soda and one teaspoon cream of tartar.  I love the flavor of cream of tartar in cookies.

4. Add one teaspoon of vanilla and a half teaspoon of lemon flavoring. 

5. Stir in two and a half cups of sifted flour.

6. Roll the dough into small balls, coat with sugar, place on an ungreased cookie sheet, and flatten with the bottom of a drinking glass.

Cookies that have already been flattened with the glass are on the right.

7. Bake in a moderate oven until desired doneness has been achieved, about 8-10 minutes.  If you like a chewy cookie, don't let these begin to brown around the edges.  They will be crunchy if you let them begin to brown.

8. Remove from cookie sheet immediately to cool.  Cooling cookies on paper towels like this helps them remain chewy.  If you want cookies that are more crunchy, use a cooling rack.

Store indefinitely in an airtight container.  From what I've read, these also freeze well, but I've never tried that.

Here is the recipe in a more compact format:

Prize Egg Yolk Cookies

1 cup butter

1 1/2 cups sugar

6 egg yolks

1 tsp. soda

1 tsp. cream of tartar

1 tsp. vanilla

1/2 tsp. lemon flavoring

2 1/2 c. sifted flour

Cream butter and sugar.  Beat in next five ingredients.  Stir in flour.  Shape into small balls, roll in sugar, place on cookie sheet and flatten with a glass.  Bake at 350 for 8-10 minutes.

These have that classic sugar cookie flavor that many people love.  Enjoy!



Lavon's Ginger Cookies

One of the things that I enjoyed the most about my time spent as a local banker over a decade ago was that if I had a question about anything, all I had to do was wait until the right customer came in, and I could get the answer from an expert.  I learned about chuck wagon cooking from a lady who had grown up in Cherry County, Nebraska, for example.  Another lady taught me about potato salad dressing made with sour cream.  I was schooled in our community's history by many older ladies and gentlemen, and I was taught the genealogy of most of the other "old guard" families in our area.

Another thing that was great fun was the fact that several of the older women in the community would bring us various types of food.  Among the things I remember were buttermilk cake, prune pie, rhubarb jam, whole wheat bread, and ginger cookies made from the recipe that I'm going to share with you.

Lavon was one of the prettiest elderly ladies that we waited on.  My grandmother had known her as one of the older girls when she was growing up in the township to the west of ours, and she had always remembered her as being extraordinarily beautiful in her youth, too.  One day shortly before Christmas, Lavon brought us some of the ginger cookies that she had always made for her family for Christmas.  She was in her late eighties or early nineties by that time, and she talked about how she had skipped making them one year because they were getting to be a lot of work for her.  A grandson complained so loudly, however, that she had resumed baking them while she still could.  She told me a little about the process of making the cookies, and I asked if she would share the recipe.

A few days later, she brought in a copy of the recipe in her own handwriting with notes scrawled in the margin, and it was the dearest gift she could have given.  I've scanned it so that you can see it below.

This is a very old recipe, but they are truly delicious cookies with an old-fashioned flavor that just can't be beat.  They also keep beautifully.  I will confess that the first time I made these, I had so many Christmas cookies and sweets that I didn't get these frosted in time for Christmas.  In the holiday hubbub, I forgot about them in a tin on the dining room hutch.  I'm embarrassed to admit that it wasn't until summer vacation that I discovered that they were there, and they were just as fresh and tasty as they had been in the beginning.  I frosted them and enjoyed them perhaps more than I would have at Christmas.

Since Lavon's handwriting is a little difficult to read due to the arthritis and poor eyesight which affected her in her later years, I'll translate for you.

In a heavy, large kettle (the Magnalite kettle that you see in the pictures below is a 5-quart Dutch oven), place 1 cup shortening.  Put this on the fire and let it begin to melt.

Add 1 cup of molasses and stir.

Add 2 cups of sugar, 1 tsp. cinnamon, 2 tsp. ginger, and 1/2 tsp. salt.  (Lavon warns not to add the sugar earlier than this.) 

Stir all of this together well and bring it to a boil.

Once this mixture boils, remove it from the fire immediately.  One of Lavon's notes in the margin warned to not let the mixture continue to boil.  I'm sure that this is so that the sugar doesn't begin to work toward soft ball stage.

Once the mixture has been removed from the fire, add 1 tsp. of baking soda.  Stir this in and watch carefully since it could foam over.

This part is really fascinating to watch.  Once it appears to be done foaming, let this mixture cool until it is kind of lukewarm.

Add two beaten eggs and some vanilla flavoring.

Then add enough flour to make a dough that will be able to be rolled out after it has been chilled.  Lavon said to add four cups of flour, but I find that more is necessary.

Let the dough stand in the refrigerator (or on your cold back porch) until well chilled.  Lavon said several hours or several days would work.

Roll out the dough and cut it into desired shapes.  I use a gingerbread man cutter, but the cookie that Lavon brought us was a star.

Bake these cookies on a greased cookie sheet for 8-10 minutes in a moderate oven.

Lavon frosted these with a thin powdered sugar glaze, but my sweet tooth prefers a thicker frosting.  Either way, these are a very enjoyable old-style cookie.

I hope you all have a Merry Christmas.  We were supposed to have 1-3" of snow this morning.  It looks to me like we've had somewhere over 6", and when it comes on the day before Christmas, it couldn't be more perfect timing.  Remember that the birth of our Savior is the reason that we celebrate at this time of the year!

Browned Butter-Pecan Cookies: Another Kitchen Klatter Recipe

I feel guilty about the number of recipes for sweets that I include here on the blog.  Our cookstove is basically our sole means of cooking from October to May, and we cook and eat a lot more than just desserts and candy around here.  The problem is that I'm very much a meat-and-potatoes kind of guy; in fact, I'm not sure that I would ever get tired of that combination for the main meal of every day.

All of the cooks in my family always planned their meals around the "meat, starch, vegetable, fruit, and glass of milk" pattern, and to this day my favorite meals are like that.  The potatoes were usually mashed, sometimes baked or replaced with rice or noodles for infrequent variety.  The meat was seasoned nicely, cooked well done--but not overly so.  The vegetable was usually just boiled, occasionally buttered, and maybe lightly salted.  Fruits were fresh, in Jello, or home-canned.  That plan makes for balanced, economical eating (I bought a cookbook entitled something like Flat Out Dirt Cheap Cooking and was surprised that the recipes fell into two categories: "familiar" or "more expensive than what I was used to").  The only problem with that kind of menu is that it makes for rather uninteresting blogging.

I notice, though, that the majority of the cookbooks that I have are as unbalanced as my blog.  While proportionately I eat more nutritious foods than sweet foods, the vast majority of nearly every cookbook is spent on sweets of some variety.  Thus ends my apology for sharing another unhealthy recipe.

I recently spent some time going over my Kitchen Klatter Cookbook--the book I think of as the Southwest Iowa Kitchen Bible--looking for new ways to prepare round steak.  We tried a couple of good steak recipes, but nothing worth sharing yet.  Of course, I was distracted by the cookie section and marked a few recipes to try, and this one has been a real winner with us.  It also has been given good reviews by my family and co-workers.  Here is how they are made:

1. Brown one cup of butter over the fire.  Set aside.

Butter melting over the fire in the Margin Gem.

The same butter browning nicely.  I find that a larger pan works
best to brown large amounts of butter in.  If the pan is smaller and
the melted butter deeper, the butter tends to boil for a while before
it finally decides to get brown.

2. In a large mixing bowl, beat together two cups of brown sugar, two eggs, and a teaspoon of X-Tra-Touch maple flavoring.  If you don't have X-tra-Touch maple flavoring, you can order some here.  If you are going to use a different brand of maple flavoring, you might want to start with a 1/2 teaspoon and adjust from there.  For example, I use Mapleine for making homemade pancake syrup, and to quote my brother-in-law, "that stuff is high-octane."

The eggs, brown sugar, and maple flavoring ready to be beaten.

The same combination as above after it was beaten.

3. Pour the browned butter over the sugar, egg and flavoring mixture.  Beat together.  It surprises me how long it takes to incorporate the melted butter.

4. Stir in a 1 tsp. baking soda, a 1 tsp. cream of tartar.  You can add a 1/4 tsp. salt if you want to, but I omit this and don't miss it.

5. Stir in one cup of finely chopped pecans.

6. Then add three cups of sifted flour.

If you let your butter cool a little before you mixed it in, you should have a pretty stiff dough now.

7. Shape the dough into a roll and wrap it in waxed paper.  Chill the dough for at least twenty-four hours.

The roll of cookie dough ready to go into the refrigerator.

8. When you are ready to bake the cookies, you need to build your fire so that you have a moderately hot oven.  The recipe says to bake these at 375.

9. Slice thin (1/4 inch) cookies off the roll of dough, and place them on an ungreased cookie sheet.  Leave plenty of space between the cookies because they expand quite a bit while baking.

10. The recipe says to bake these for ten minutes at 375.  I say bake them however long you like.  Truthfully, I'm kind of entertained by recipes that have an exact baking time on them.  After having cooked with a wood cookstove for so long, I detect doneness by look, feel, and smell rather than minutes.  The temperature in a modern oven varies widely too according to when the element or burner cycles on and off, so a range of minutes seems more realistic to me.  Cookies like this that are sliced or rolled and cut can also need more or less baking time depending on how thick they are.

If you like a chewy cookie like Nancy and I do, take them out of the oven when they have completely risen and are just starting to brown around the edges.  If you like a really crispy cookie, leave them in the oven until they are a uniform caramel color but have not yet fallen.  Aunt Meme used to always tell me that you can tell that a cookie is sufficiently baked if you can remove it from the cookie sheet easily.

These are done enough for Nancy and me.  My mom would
say that they're not any good yet.

11. Remove from cookie sheet to whatever you usually cool your cookies on.  I like to use a layer of paper toweling on the enamel countertop of our vintage Sellers cupboard because that is what Meme taught me to do many years ago.  Cooling cookies this way results in a chewier cookie than cooling them on a rack does.

The first sheet of finished cookies.

A hint: The first time I baked these cookies, I didn't let the browned butter cool at all before I poured it over the egg and sugar mixture.  Of course, you have to beat quickly then so that your butter doesn't cook your eggs.  The dough was also quite warm then, and while it was easier to stir in the flour since the dough was so soft, I had a terrible time getting the dough shaped into a roll.

The second time I baked these, I had a phone call in the middle of the process, so the butter got a chance to cool quite a bit before I poured it on top of the sugar and egg mixture.  I had to work a little harder to get the flour stirred in, but I think that the extra effort was worth it because I was able to make the neat, uniform roll that you see in the pictures here.

Here is the recipe the way that it appears on page 438 of the Kitchen Klatter Cookbook:

Browned Butter-Pecan Cookies

 

1 cup butter, browned

2 cups brown sugar

2 beaten eggs

1 tsp. Kitchen-Klatter [X-tra-Touch] maple flavoring

1 cup finely chopped pecans

2 cups flour

1 tsp. baking soda

1 tsp. cream of tartar

1/4 tsp. salt

 

Melt butter and brown nicely.  Pour over brown sugar, eggs and flavoring.  Add pecans.  Add dry ingredients which have been sifted.  Form into rolls and chill for 24 hours.  Slice thin and bake for 10 minutes in a 375-degree oven.

 

 

Trust me; these are delicious!