Sugar Cookies (1877)

These soft and squishy sugar cookies are delectably addictive! Made with sour cream, they look and taste like a viral 1970’s recipe our grandmothers all copied from each other’s recipe boxes…but they’re pure 1800’s goodness.

Dear friends ~

For an easy little recipe, I really tinkered with this one! 

It’s from a delightful 1877 cook book that was published in Toronto, and an interesting thing about this volume is that it has a bigger selection of cake and cookie recipes than most of my other cook books from the era, perhaps with the exception of The White House Cook Book. (Lots of rich cookery in that one too!)

This was one of those recipes that leaves the amount of flour up to the intuition of the baker, and for temperature says simply to “bake quick”, so it left room for interpretation, and was fun to experiment with. 

The result is a very light, slightly cake-y cookie, with a beautiful crinkly top. These are reminiscent of the “light tea cakes” that were still so popular, and which were generally rolled and cut into circles, rather than baked in pans. It’s also a great recipe to share with a crowd–this makes about 6.5 dozen 2″ cookies!

Here’s a photo of the recipe as it appears in the cookbook:

A FEW COOKING NOTES: 

Let’s talk about sour cream

At the time this cook book was published, they of course weren’t buying pasteurized sour cream in tubs like we do now. This would have been “clabbered cream”, or cream that had just begun to turn pleasantly sour. (Gil Marks, the beloved food historian, has a great section about 1800’s sour cream halfway through this article on the history of coffee cake, which he wrote before he passed away.)

Raw cream goes through a whole different magic when it “turns”, as opposed to pasteurized cream, which would get extremely unpleasant if left on the counter for several days. The White House Cook Book (1887) offers some tips about using sour milk or cream in baking, and instructs that it’s “always best when just turned, so that it is solid, and not sour enough to whey or to be watery.” (If you’ve ever accidentally let raw sour cream get away from you and go too long, you’ll know exactly what this passage means.)

Making this cookie recipe today, I did use commercially available sour cream. I’ve baked quite a bit with homemade raw sour cream in the past, and while it does very slightly change the flavor profile (depending on how sour your cream is), the texture and taste in the finished baked goods are remarkably similar.

If you’d like to be as historic as possible about this, and want to make your own, I find the best consistency for raw sour cream comes from the cream that’s skimmed off fresh whole milk which has been allowed to sit undisturbed for 2-3 days. This gives a much thicker end product than cream skimmed from today’s milking.

If you’d like to make your own cultured sour cream from pasteurized milk, you can do that too, but you’ll need a starter (you can get it here), since pasteurized cream has no beneficial bacteria to steer the fermentation process.

How much flour to use?  

This recipe leaves the amount of flour up to the intuition of the baker, as many recipes at the time did. In fact, you probably notice that the word “flour” isn’t even mentioned. 

This wasn’t unusual for recipes of the mid-1800s, and phrases like “mix to roll, mix just enough to roll, flour enough to roll, or mix stiff enough to roll” were common ways of instructing the baker to add flour until the batter or dough was the right consistency, usually as the final step after all other ingredients had been incorporated.

I tinkered quite a bit with this, and found that 2 and ⅔ cups unbleached flour was the amount that made it possible to roll this dough and cut it out, without it ending up dense and cake-y.

Oven temperature​

The recipe tells us to “bake quick”, which really could be anything from about 375°F to 425°. So I tried that entire range of temperatures. I found that 375° really worked best for this recipe, since 400° made the bottoms of the cookies a bit too brown, by the time the tops were set. 425° is right out.

How thick to roll the dough

Of course, as with all of these variables, there’s room for personal preference here. After a bit of experimenting, I found that rolling the dough ¼″ thick gave me the results I enjoyed the most.

Cookie size​

This is a fun time to get out the cookie cutter stash and have at it! Circles and diamonds were the most frequent “every day” shapes for cookies, but there’s no reason you can’t have fun with this. Keep in mind that these are a puffy cookie, so simple shapes work best.

I used an antique circle cutter from my grandmother, which is 1.5″ in diameter. At 375° for 8 minutes, that gave me perfectly-done, 2″ round cookies. 

A nice thing about this size is that they fit beautifully in a 4″ square bakers box, in sets of 12 or 16…perfect for gifting. (Fun note, I actually came across a tutorial for making “paper boxes” for baked goods in an 1880’s cookbook the other day. You can let me know in the poll below if this is something you’d enjoy seeing in the newsletter.)

How long to bake these

I found that 8 minutes at 375 F cooked my 1.5″ diameter cookies to perfection. If you wanted to use a larger cookie cutter, you’ll want play this by ear and just keep a close eye on them. These are done when the centers are set, and the edges just barely beginning to be golden.

---

A always, feel free to send me an email anytime, with recipe requests! ‘Til next time, ~ Anna

This post was originally published in the 1800’s Housewife newsletter. Not on the mailing list? You can join here to receive full recipes with cooking notes straight to your inbox!

📖 Recipe