Tag: cookies

Cooking Techniques · Recipe Collections · The Vintage Kitchen

Sue Makes Sugar Cookies

VintageJenny
Sue and Ruth Ann get ready to cream butter with their “holey” spoons.

When I turned to Lesson 31, where Sue makes Sugar Cookies, I was a little surprised at how filthy the pages were. This recipe from When Sue Began to Cook was spattered with 100 year old flour stains. They sported a dot or two of grease, and even a little splash of age old vanilla extract. Apparently this is an excellent sugar cookie recipe.

This is our 31st lesson from this cookbook, and we’re a little over halfway through the year. My copy of the book was actually missing one of the earlier lessons on walnut fudge. The pages were ripped right out of the book. That must have been a sacred family recipe. If this is your first adventure with Sue and her friend Ruth Ann, click the linked book title in the first paragraph to be transported back to the beginning. A whole story goes along with these cooking lessons and you don’t want to miss any of it.

Last week Sue and Ruth Ann learned how to make a sponge cake and fold egg whites into a batter. This week they cream fat and sugar together. And Sue has lots to say about it…

Sue’s Notes from Sugar Cookies Day

“You may each get out one of the yellow mixing bowls,” Mother said, “and one of the holey spoons.” Ruth Ann and I were both glad because we knew that meant “creaming,” and we like to cream things.

We have a porcelain topped table at our house. It’s just the thing to roll cookies on. Mother had us sprinkle some flour on the clean table so the cookies wouldn’t stick. Then she had us take up half the dough in our hands and roll it together. (Of course, we washed our hands just before we began to make the cookies.) Then we put the dough on the floured table top.

Next we dusted the rolling pin with flour. Mother showed us how to roll out the dough as evenly as possible till it was about an eighth of an inch thick. Then we took the cooky cutter, dipped it into the flour and cut the cookies out. We really took several cooky cutters before we were through. We made our cookies in the shape of stars, ducks, and hearts.)

After we had cut out all the cookies we could, there was still some dough left. Mother had us make a ball of it and roll it out again and cut out some more cookies.

The Neighborhood Cookies

We made “neighborhood cookies” today, and at the time I write this, there isn’t a single one left!

There has been a regular epidemic of painting and yard cleaning in this neighborhood lately. I wrote about the McCarthy’s sudden interest in window washing. Well, after that was all finished they began to paint their house. It was so much fun with everybody standing around and giving advice that Robin and Teddy began to tease to paint something too. Of course, they are much littler than Clarence Patrick and Clyde. So Mother bought them some paint and let them paint the back fence between our yard and Teddy’s.

So today Ruth Ann and I announced that after our cooking lesson we would treat every real “neighborhood worker” to cookies. Everybody, that is, who had spent the whole morning in painting or gardening. Or cleaning up a back yard. Or doing something useful outdoors. It was a wonderful day for work and our cookies melted away like snowballs in August, as Father says. But it was worth it! This is getting to be the cleanest, neatest, shiniest, paintiest neighborhood in town!

Sue

And that is how Sue made Sugar Cookies during her Saturday cooking class.

Note: While I correct most of Sue’s atrocious spelling, her spelling of cookie as cooky, when talking about only one, is correct through the 1950s.

Print Recipe

Sugar Cookies

From When Sue Began to Cook, by Louise Bennett Weaver
Course: Dessert, Snack, Tea time
Cuisine: American
Keyword: baking, Bettina, cookies, dessert, Ruth Ann, Sue, teatime

Ingredients

  • ½ cup lard Any solid shortening should work here
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 2 eggs
  • 4 Tbsp water
  • 1 tsp vanilla
  • 2⅓ cups flour
  • ¼ tsp salt
  • ½ tsp powdered nutmeg
  • 2 tsp baking powder

Instructions

  • Measure out the lard into a bowl, and cream it with a wooden spoon (mash it down over and over) until it is very soft. The cookbook suggests using a spoon with a hole in the middle if you have one. Then add the sugar slowly, creaming all the time, until it is all added and well mixed.
  • Break the eggs into a smaller bowl, and add the water and vanilla. Beath this egg mixture up all together with a Dover egg beater and then add it to the sugar mixture. Beat it all up very had with the same spoon until it is well mixed.
  • Now take the dry ingredients and mix them up together, and then stir them into the wet mixture. (Or you can use a sifter, if you have one, and sift the dry ingredients over the bowl.)
  • Roll out until about one-eighth inch thick, and then cut out with a cutter dipped in flour. Grease a cookie sheet and bake in a moderate oven (350-375℉) for fifteen minutes.
Cooking Techniques · The Vintage Kitchen

When Sue Began to Cook

VintageJenny
Illustration from When Sue Began to Cook

On a rainy, dreary November afternoon, Sue complains to her mother that there’s nothing to do. Her brother is at a friend’s house, As for her best friend Ruth Ann — well, she cries all the time now that her mother has been sent away for her health. This is the beginning of When Sue Began to Cook, the last book in the Bettina storybook trilogy by Louise Bennett Weaver.

The complete title of the book is When Sue Began to Cook with Bettina’s Best Recipes. Bettina’s Best Recipes became the brand name of a whole line of cookbooks in the 1920s. Bettina was an authority on cakes and cookies, desserts, sandwiches, and salads. And each topic found its way into one of the Bettina’s Best Recipes cookbooks.

Like all the Bettina books, Sue’s story begins with some really bad poetry:

To every other little maid
Who longs to learn like Sue,
But feels a tiny bit afraid
It’s all too hard to do,
To all the little girls who sigh,
“I need a simple book
To help me!” “Here it is!” we cry,
When Sue Began to Cook

Dedication, When Sue Began to Cook, Louise Bennett Weaver and Helen Cowles LeCron

Bettina suggests that Sue invite Ruth Ann over for weekly cooking lessons. Then Bettina will teach them both to cook. The plan will occupy Sue at the same time that it gives Ruth Ann something to think about besides her sick mother. (In 1924 when the book was written, Ruth Ann’s mother probably has tuberculosis and was sent to Arizona for the dry air in hopes that it would cure her. The book, however, never says.)

Sue loves the idea, and runs to tell Ruth Ann about the new Saturday plans. The girls’ story unfolds from the notes that Sue keeps after each cooking session. Here are her notes from the first day:

I found Ruth Ann crying, as usual, but it didn’t take her long, after she heard about the Cooking Class, to hustle into a clean dress and hurry over. And oh, the cookies were delicious! 

I intended to save mine for dinner tonight, but of course Robin and Ted came in perfectly ravenous and teased so hard that I had to give them ten or twelve apiece and that doesn’t leave many for Father when he comes. But how proud he’ll be to try his daughter’s first cookies. That is, the first ones I’ve made entirely alone, even to lighting the oven and washing the dishes afterwards.

When Sue Began to Cook, page 14.

As a first recipe, Sue and Ruth Ann make Cocoa Drop Cookies. Then the next week they start at the beginning and learn to make Frizzled Beef over Toast. This recipe is known regionally under many different names in the United States. Chipped beef, SOS, and S—- on a Shingle are but three of the ways people refer to this dish.

Each week Sue and Ruth Ann tackle a new recipe or cooking method, and they build a nice repertoire of recipes through the year. A winter Wheat Cereal with Dates progresses to gingerbread. Then spring brings Baked Ham with Browned Potatoes. The heat of summer brings recipes for Vanilla Ice Cream with Chocolate Sauce, Fruit Sherbet, and a Fruit Gelatin. Then the autumn rolls around again, with its traditional Twenties recipes for doughnuts, peanut brittle, and popcorn balls.

In Chapter 52, the last week of the year’s lessons. the girls present a party for their friends. They cook an entire meal from recipes in the book, and proudly present the fruits of their yearlong course.

When Sue Began to Cook makes a good beginning cookbook for teens interested in cooking history, for cookbook collectors, and for people who want to learn to cook simple recipes. Currently this book is unavailable in any free downloadable format, so you’ll have to search out a 1924 copy yourself.

If you’re new to the world of Bettina cookbooks, I wrote about the first one in the post A Cookbook Worth Reading.

Print Recipe

Cocoa Drop Cookies

Taken from When Sue Began to Cook, 1924.
Course: Dessert
Cuisine: American
Keyword: Bettina, cookies, Twenties

Ingredients

  • ½ cup lard Mother says butter makes them too rich.
  • 1 cup light brown sugar No lumps, remember!
  • 2 eggs
  • 4 tbsp water
  • 1 tsp vanilla
  • 2⅓ cups flour
  • 4 tbsp cocoa Leveled off with a knife blade.
  • 2½ tsp baking powder Leveled off with a knife, too. This is important.
  • ¼ tsp salt All good cookies have salt in them.

Instructions

  • Mother had us each put the lard in a nice round-bottomed yellow bowl and cream it. (That means mash it down with a big spoon until it is very soft.) And then add the sugar and keep on creaming until the mixture looked all one color. Then we broke the eggs into a little dish and added them one by one to the sugar mixture. (Mother said to break and add them one by one so as to be very sure they were good.) Then we kept on stirring with the big holey spoon for two whole minutes. Then we added the water and the vanilla.
  • We put a little more than two and one-third cups of flour through the flour sifter and after it had been sifted once, we measured it out and took exactly two and one-third cups of it. Then we put it back in the empty sifter and added the cocoa, the baking powder and the salt. We sifted them through twice all together.
  • (Mother says we must always be very sure about the level spoonful. She had us take a knife and level the filled spoons off very carefully. This is important.)
  • We dumped the flour mixture into the bowl with the other things, and stirred just enough to be sure everything was well mixed.
  • Then we each greased our cooky-sheet with a clean piece of paper that had been dipped in a little lard. (Several pie pans will do instead, Mother says.) Then we took up a little of the cooky-dough on the end of the mixing spoon and scraped it oiff on the cooky-sheet with a knife. (She told us to be sure these little cooky mounds weren't too large; they oughtn't to be more than an inch across.) We dropped these bits of dough about three inches apart on the greased sheet and flattened each of them down a little with a knife that had just been dipped in warm water.
  • Then we baked the cookies in a moderate oven for about fifteen minutes. [Moderate oven: 350-375º F] Mother had us light the oven a few minutes ahead of time, and then turn it down so it wouldn't be too hot when the cookies were put in.
  • Chocolate or cocoa cookies burn easily, she said, so we looked at them often. Sometimes those on the edge of the pan got done first and had to be removed carefully and slipped onto another flat pan to cool. All our cookies couldn't be baked at once, so we kept the dough in a cool place (not near the stove!) until the oven was ready again.
  • As soon as the cookies were all finished and cool, we each packed them carefully away in a stone jar.

Notes

This recipe is taken directly from When Sue Began to Cook, copyright 1924, by Louise Bennett Weaver and Helen Cowles LeCron.