Anna's Crisp Butterscotch Cookies: or, The best recipes are sometimes hard to read

No one complained about how many of these I made.

Anna's Butterscotch Ice Box Cookies 3 cups flour 2 tsp baking powder ½ tsp salt 1 cup butter 2 cups brown sugar (we recommend dark) 2 medium eggs* Sift together the butter, baking powder, and salt. Cream the butter and sugar. Mix in eggs one at a time, then beat well. Mix in the dry ingredients. Form the dough into two logs. If you find the dough a bit unwieldy to handle, divide it into three or four smaller logs instead. Wrap them and refrigerate overnight. When ready to bake, heat oven to 375°. Have greased or paper-lined cookie sheets ready. Slice the dough thinly. Set on the pan about 3 or so inches apart. These cookies become very thin as they bake, so they need plenty of room to spread. Bake for about 8-10 minutes, or until very slightly darkened at the edges. Keep unbaked dough refrigerated between batches. *If you only have large eggs (or any other size that is bigger then medium), then add additional flour until the dough is just barely firm enough to easily shape in your hands.

This comes from my great-grandmother's binder. It's nice to know that even she didn't always maintain perfect Palmer Method penmanship. Her handwriting on this recipe is nearly as bad as mine is every day. 

We'll never know what a number is doing in the middle of "Anna's #1630 Cookies."

Someone else labeled it "Anna's Cookies — Ice Box," which gives us a sliver of the history behind this recipe. If Anna is who I think she is, photos of her show a woman whose eyes could jackhammer right through you, and whose hollow face suggests that she never got what she wanted out of life.

But enough about that- let's make her cookies. Doing some heavy-handed photo manipulation involving a lot of color filters, we managed to make the blue pencil stand out from the blank paper. The writing may not be easier to read, but at least it's easier to see.

I love how this recipe seems more like a note-to-self than anything else in the book. If you overcome the rushed handwriting, she shortened the mixing instructions to "Sift dry. Cream. Add eggs, beaten. Add dry, mix well." Further down the page, I managed to decipher "form into 2 rolls wrap [some short word] and chill overnight," the word "thin," and "375°." The only time my great-grandmother made the instructions any shorter than this recipe, she was writing out a cake on a polling card. As some readers will recall, we only got an ingredient list and a note to put lemon filling in the middle and white frosting on top.

After I managed to decipher all but one word of this recipe, it was time to make it. Anna's cookies start off strong, with a lot of brown sugar and butter. I didn't know if the cookies would be any good, but I knew the dough would taste amazing.

If you slice your butter thinly and then take a tea break, it will be softened around the time you're done.

Jumping ahead in time, I made another batch of these. Since I cut the recipe in half, I only made log of dough. I only say this so I can note that apparently Anna made twice this many whenever she baked this recipe. Apparently when Anna made cookies, she made enough for everybody.

To repeat: the original recipe makes two of these.

Getting back to where we were: I've been trying to stop taste-testing raw cookie dough until the bird flu goes away (if it ever does). But this dough was so, so, ever-so good. I had debated whether to add some vanilla, thinking that it might have been implied on this hastily-written note of a recipe. But I don't think these cookies need it.

Our original recipe says "Form into 2 rolls, wrap and chill overnight" (or at least, it says something like that). So in theory, we are supposed make this half-batch into one roll. But I liked the idea of making small cookies, so I made two very skinny rolls instead. I should have known something was awry when I was shaping the dough. I could only handle it for a minute or so before it melted under my hands.

I rarely have the patience to leave dough overnight in the refrigerator. As a result, my icebox cookies always get squished and misshapen as I slice them. But since we only have about 25 legible words of instructions, skipping a single sentence would leave us with nearly nothing to do. I couldn't spare a single step. Therefore, the cookies had to wait until tomorrow.

The next day, the dough logs had firmed up a lot. When I put them onto the cutting board, they retained perfect imprints where the plastic wrap had squished them overnight.

I've found (or at least, reluctantly acknowledged) that it's easier to slice cookie dough on an actual cutting board than a dinner plate-- even if the board barely fits in the dishwasher. At the expense of a slightly more inconvenient dishwashing experience, we cut these in less than two minutes. And really, it only took me that long because I don't make icebox cookies often enough to make even(ish) slices without pausing to carefully position the blade for each cookie. 

While we're on the subject, I think cookie dough is easier to cut with a metal spatula than with a knife. A spatula works just like the bench scraper that would be used in a professional bakeshop, but you're more likely to have one in the house.

As I watched the cookies melt through the oven window, I suspected that I had underfloured the dough. Despite out the flour correctly, we may have once again fallen victim to the ongoing crisis of butter moisture. 

Even if the butter was fine, our eggs may have been too big and thus added too much water. Older cookbooks say that medium eggs are the recipe standard. But at some point long after this binder was put together, the default shifted from medium to large. These days, medium eggs are hard to find. The stores near me tend to only stock large and extra-large.

But for all my fretting about moist butter and watery eggs, these melted-and-hardened cookies may be just what Anna intended. I say this because the after the cookies melted in the oven, they were cute, round, thin, and crisp. It didn't matter what malformed shape they were before baking, nor did my uneven slicing affect them.  They looked like they had gone right.

When I tasted one, I decided to bake the rest of the dough even though the first cookies had melted. It's true that most cookies (icebox or otherwise) aren't supposed to melt until they're completely flat, but these had become such perfectly crisp wafers. They were like gingersnaps, but more deliciously fragile. Also, they tasted like some of the best butterscotch I've ever had.

Even though these cookies didn't last long on the plate, I remained uncertain about whether they had come out right. Icebox cookie dough usually isn't too sticky to shape. So I decided to try adding just enough extra flour that the dough didn't stick to everything. Doesn't it look easier to work with?

Because I like how easy it is to make small cookies when I don't have to shape each of them one at a time, I made this into very skinny logs. The refrigerator could barely accommodate them.

These behaved like icebox cookies generally do, but the first ones were a lot better to eat. You can see these ones spreading out just a little bit, but they didn't quite melt in the oven like our first batch did.  However, the first ones were delicate and crisp, but these were just hard.

Purely for the heck of it, I re-smushed the rest of the dough into a much chunkier log and cut very thick slices. This gave us really good, soft cookies. I liked them a lot this way, even it it meant I was disobeying what little I could read of the directions. Despite my selective approach to following directions, these were more like what I had thought the recipe should be. However, I have to admit that the extra-crispy first batch seemed special while these were merely good.

But these cookies didn't quite want to leave my head. They were definitely good, but I'm pretty sure they're not supposed to melt into dough puddles in the oven. Going back to my thoughts about medium versus large eggs, I thought that reducing the egg size might be just what the recipe needs. I didn't want to think that Anna made just-shy-of-perfect cookies all her life just because of 21^st-century egg sizes. (Also, if it seems like I seem to be making these cookies a lot, it's because people kept asking for them.) 

And so, I turned a large egg into a medium one. 

Right to left: One medium egg, and a little extra on the side.

The cookies still spread out a lot. But even though that's not what icebox cookies usually do, I think these are supposed to. They just seemed right. Also, and perhaps most importantly, everyone who tried these kept saying how good they were. They're the kind of cookies that keep you coming back for just one more, only to turn right back around and decide that "just one more" wasn't enough. 

Chicago-Style Cheesecake (I think)

The hell with it, we're making cheesecake.

Chicago-style Cheesecake        Crust: 6 oz (about 1⅔ cups) graham cracker crumbs* 2 tbsp butter 2 tbsp sugar Pinch of salt (if butter is unsalted)        Filling: 1 cup sugar 1 pound cream cheese 2 tbsp flour Pinch of salt 1 tsp vanilla 4 eggs, separated 1 cup cream        To make the crust: Cream the butter and sugar. Mix in the crumbs. This is easiest with your hands or with an electric mixer, instead of with a spoon. Press the crumbs into the bottom of a deep springform pan. If you don't have one, you can use a 9" square pan or a very large cast-iron skillet.        To make the filling: Beat the sugar and cream cheese until well creamed. Add flour and salt, beat in thoroughly. Add the vanilla and egg yolks, mix well. Then mix in the cream. Beat the egg whites until almost-but-not-quite stiff peaks form. Then fold them into the batter. Pour the batter into the pan and bake at least one hour. It is done when the center springs back when lightly pressed with the finger. *The original recipe calls for crushed zwieback crackers, but those are surprisingly hard to find these days. Unless you really want to be period-correct, graham crackers will be just fine. Source: Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933, via The Internet Archive

Note: If you want to lift the whole cheesecake out of the pan before serving it, cut a piece of cardboard to fit the bottom of the pan. Make sure there aren't any big gaps when you press it into the pan, but it shouldn't fit snugly either. You're going to want to easily lift it out after baking. Wrap the cardboard in foil. Next, cut two wide strips of parchment paper (say, 2 or so inches), that are long enough to lay across the pan and stick out a little over each side. Grease the pan. Then lay the paper strips crosswise across it so they cross in the center. You want both ends of each strip to stick out over the edge of the pan. Then put the cardboard into the pan on top of the paper. You now have a pan with four paper tabs poking up from the cardboard you put on the bottom. Put the crust mixture on top of the cardboard, and proceed with the recipe. After you have the batter on top of the crust, you should have four paper tabs sticking up from the edges of the pan. After baking the cheesecake and then refrigerating it until it's completely chilled, cut around the edge of the pan to free the cake, being sure to cut between the paper and the cheesecake. Then lift the cheesecake by the paper tabs. You can now set it on whatever serving platter you like. You could use just one paper strip instead of two. But I recommend using two paper strips, which gives you a backup in case one of them rips.

As the tariff-mongering and other ethical disasters from the alleged president threaten to make food even more expensive, I decided to indulge while we still can. 

I should note that this cheesecake is brought to you by my grandmother, who decided to send each of her grandchildren a surprise check. I should also note that when I called her to say thank you and told her that I had used part of her gift on cream cheese, she asked "Are you going to save me any?"  

Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933, via The Internet Archive

The original recipe calls for "1 package zwieback" to make the crust, so I assumed they were a standard size. Just to see what turned up, I did an image search for "1930s zwieback package." I found a surprising number of pictures of really old cracker boxes. All of them were six ounces, regardless of brand.

I didn't think I'd find 90-year-old food packaging sizes so easily. As I was making a note on my recipe printout so I wouldn't have to look this up again, I started thinking about how the "Information Age" isn't going as well as we thought it would in the 1990s. Facts may be at our fingertips, but people still believe in alpha males, "great replacement theories," and other nonsense. 

But enough about current events, let's get down to cheesecake. Even if you set aside the lavish use of eggs, this is one of the more extravagant recipes in this book, and that includes the "Quick Caviar Canapes" on page seven. I guess even in the 1930s, you ignored your grocery budget if you wanted a cheesecake.

The last time we made a cheesecake recipe from Chicago, it was unpleasantly fluffy. Everyone who tried it agreed that it was a lot better before we baked it. But it got me wondering about "Chicago-style cheesecake," which apparently is a real thing. I don't know if today's recipe is in fact "Chicago-style cheesecake," but it is a cheesecake recipe printed in Chicago.

As with so many cheesecakes, we start with a crumb crust. But unusually, the recipe tells us to cream the butter and sugar instead of melting them and then mashing in the crumbs. This seemed silly until I realized that you couldn't simply pop your butter in the microwave in 1933. So really, Mrs. Mary Martensen is sparing us the bother of putting a saucepan on the stove and then having to wash it later.

Actually, that picture is a bit misleading. We're using a lot more crumbs than that little pile of them. I wondered if the butter would manage to coat them all.

At first, I worried that the mixer would ruin the crackers. Then I remembered that they were supposed to be pulverized anyway.

Distributing the butter among the crumbs might have taken a while if you couldn't afford a mixer at 1930s prices (seriously, people had to buy them on installment). But since we live in an era when you can get power tools at thrift shops, this was the fastest graham cracker crust I've ever made. The crumbs looked just as dry after mixing, but then I figured the butter would melt as it baked.

And now we must make a brief construction detour. Since I wanted to be extra-fancy and serve the cheesecake on a platter, I needed to be able to lift it out of the pan intact. With that in mind, I put some handle-straps into place.

Then, I put in a foil-wrapped cardboard circle on which the cheesecake could rest.

After all that prepwork, I pressed in the crust and saw that the cheesecake would never fit. I would say that all my efforts were pointless, but they did let me find out my pan was inadequate before it was too late. Also, since this recipe uses a crumb crust, I just had to dump it back into the mixing bowl. I didn't have to carefully lift a sheet of pie dough without ripping it.

 

As I was rummaging for something better, I wanted to use the big, extra-deep square pan that I usually use for casseroles. Unfortunately, I sent a friend home with a cake in that pan a while ago. And after delivering many unsolicited rants about how much I hate people who give away food and then want their stupid containers back (I didn't use the word "stupid"), I can't bring myself to ask him to wash and return it. I ended up getting out the big skillet for the purpose. I cannot overstate how weird it felt to put a cheesecake in cast iron, but there was no other way.

 

Look how roomy the pan is! Surely I could fit an entire cheesecake in here. And since it takes so long for heat to penetrate heavy iron, I optimistically hoped that it would be like those  bands that people soak in cold water and wrap around pans to keep the edges of a cake from overcooking before the center is done.

Anyway, now that the pan was ready, things started to look like a normal cheesecake recipe.

But then, disaster struck! Instead of adding salt to the batter, I added garlic powder!

Behold the ruination.

The garlic was still on the counter from making dinner, and all the shakers look the same. But fortunately, I had turned off the mixer instead of adding everything while the bowl spun around. I got a spoon and tried to save the cheesecake.

Eventually, I had to accept that I had removed all the garlic I could see. I had to either move on with the recipe or dump everything down the sink and start over. And starting over would have required going back to the grocery store. I would spend the rest of the recipe worrying about escaped garlic granules.

Garlic or not, it was time to add the eggs. The recipe says the yolks and whites should be "beaten separately," but I figured the yolks would be very well beaten by the time they got mixed in with everything else.

Also, since I didn't beat the yolks beforehand, we left nothing behind in the bowl! Even before eggs became a status symbol, I hated wasting them. These days, the thought of rinsing eggs away with the rest of the dirty dishes makes me sick.

No egg left behind!

At this point, we are directed to add a LOT of cream. Even in the days before homogenization, you couldn't just pour off the top milk to make this recipe. You had to go to the local grocery and purchase a half-pint for the express purpose. But if you were willing to put an entire pound of cream cheese into a single dessert, adding a whole bottle of cream probably wouldn't faze you as the clerk tallied the bill.

Our nearly-finished batter was yellower than I expected. Also, I kept tasting it to see if there was any garlic left. I couldn't decide if I was imagining garlic, or if a few ruinous granules had escaped. 

 

And now, we get to what really interested me in this recipe: fluffing it with whipped egg whites. Who the heck does this to a cheesecake? And how does it change the cake?

The recipe just tells us to use "a baking dish," and I would love to know what size Mrs. Mary Martensen had in mind. I put in as much batter as the skillet could take, leaving barely enough headspace to keep it from sloshing out while I carefully transferred it to the oven. In case you're wondering, the extra batter was like cheesecake-flavored whipped cream.

The directions say to bake this "an hour or more." I don't like running the oven for such long times now that the temperatures have warmed up. To eliminate guilt and get the most out of the oven heat, I deliberately planned a whole dinner that could be baked at 325°. But after I congratulated myself for economically loading up the oven, I realized that our supper was loaded with garlic that might infuse everything else in there. Who would have thought I would have such a hard time keeping garlic out of dessert?

 The cheesecake gradually puffed as it baked. By the time it was done, it looked like a big muffin.

 

I left the cheesecake on top of the stove to cool off. When I returned to the kitchen a bit later, I found--- horrors!--- that the cheesecake had cracked.

I'm not sure why people get so angsty about cracked cheesecakes. Unless you work at a restaurant and need picture-perfect slices for every paying customer, cracks don't hurt a thing. And if you're putting fruit filling on top, it seeps into the cracks and makes everything taste even better.

Cracks aside, I wasn't sure this would come out of the pan in one piece. Even though I had greased the pan before pouring in the batter, the cake clung to the sides. And it wanted to fall apart every time I looked at it. It is true that cheesecakes are always fragile while they're still hot. But even after this one came down to room temperature, it still seemed like it would rip apart if I disturbed it.

I decided to let that problem wait until the cheesecake had chilled for a night. Refrigerating a fully-loaded cast iron skillet felt wrong in a way I cannot describe. 

And so, after one long night of waiting, it was finally time to liberate the cheesecake! This is when all of this business with box cutters, old cardboard, and paper strips pays off. After cutting around the edge, the entire cheesecake lifted effortlessly out of the pan in two seconds. Sure, it left a lot behind in the pan that I had to scrape out. But if you can get a cake out of the pan in one piece, you have succeeded.

This cake was too big to put on a dinner plate, so I had to temporarily steal the glass platter from the microwave. As a serving note, baking the cheesecake on cardboard makes cutting easier. When the cheesecake tries to slide across the plate, you can put a finger against the cardboard instead of poking the dessert.

Just as I hoped, the graham cracker crust was no longer a dry crumbly mess after baking. Even if you tipped a slice on its side, almost nothing fell off. The crumbs were also a lot more compressed after baking. I guess spending over an hour in the oven under the weight of a cheesecake did more than I could have by patting it down.

Getting to the cheesecake itself: those whipped egg whites at the end really paid off. This thing is dangerously light and fluffy. You don't realize just how much you've eaten. And it tastes really, really, deliriously good. If the price of cream cheese holds steady, I'll have to remake this and see if letting it cool in the oven with the door slightly open prevents cracks. Not because I want another cheesecake, of course. I just need to thoroughly test the recipe.

I delivered a big hunk of it to my grandmother (naturally, in a container I didn't want back). A few days later I got a call saying it was "The best! Cheesecake! I have ever tasted!" I was also told "Don't ruin it with cherries on top!" Later, when I was on the phone with Mom, she said "They won't stop talking about that cheesecake! You're going to have to make another one!" 

It's nice to know that the cream cheese was a wise purchase.

Chocolate Bars: or, Making every recipe Mirro sent out

I didn't know I am a completionist.

Chocolate Bars ¾ cup shortening 1 cup sugar ¼ tsp salt 1 egg 2 tablespoons milk ½ teaspoon vanilla 2 ounces unsweetened chocolate, melted 2 cups sifted cake flour Heat oven to 375°. Have ungreased cookie sheets, a thin metal spatula, and a cooling rack ready. Cream the shortening, sugar, and salt. Add the egg, milk, and vanilla. Beat to mix. Then add the chocolate, and beat until whipped and very light. Then sift in the flour. Add enough to make a soft dough- you may not use all of it. The dough should not be crumbly. Put into a cookie press fitted with the bar tip. Pipe long strips of dough across the baking sheet. Then use a knife to cut lines every 2 or 3 inches, depending on how big you want the cookies to be. (Since you're not pressing the dough onto the pan, you can do this on ungreased parchment paper.) Bake 8-10 minutes (mine were done in six). Keep in a tightly sealed container if you want them to stay crisp. They will go soft otherwise. NOTE: If desired, you can substitute six tablespoons of cocoa powder for the chocolate. Increase the shortening by two tablespoons. You will draw a lot more flavor out of the cocoa powder if you melt all of the shortening in the recipe, getting it very hot. Then whisk in the cocoa powder, and allow it to cool until it re-solidifies. Source: Mirro cookie press instruction sheet (undated, but it looks like the mid-1940s)

Today we are trying the only cookie press stencil that I haven't gotten out yet, and also the last recipe on the Mirro cookie press instruction sheet.

Mirro cookie press instruction sheet

 

I melted the shortening and added the cocoa powder so it could "bloom." Honestly, I can't believe it took me so long to learn about blooming cocoa powder. It's such a simple step, but it brings out so much more chocolate flavor than simply stirring the cocoa powder in with everything else. 

I didn't intend to let the chocolate-flavored shortening sit out overnight, but we had a really big dinner and no one wanted cookies afterward. And so, like letting your fresh herbs marinate overnight in the salad dressing, the cocoa spent all night exuding all its goodness into the fat.

The next day, we plunged the beaters into the shortening and prepared to beat it soft. I don't usually cream the shortening by itself before adding the next ingredients, but it usually isn't molded to the bottom of the bowl.

Readers will note that these cookies contain no leavener besides the air that you beat into them. And so, before adding the flour, I turned the mixer to its highest speed and let it run until the batter was beautifully whipped and utterly delicious.

I loved how easy these would theoretically be to squirt out. As I understood it, you don't even need to press these out one at a time. You just extrude long strips of dough on the pan and then break them up into cookies. In theory, I might even fit an entire batch onto a single pan! (Or two pans if I wasn't halving the recipe.)

At first, I tried piping out long cookie strips and then cutting them and spreading them apart. My first attempt at pushing out ribbons of cookie dough were wobbly and sad. I couldn't decide if I didn't like using the cookie press this way, or if I would get better with a little practice.

For the next batch, I tried putting short strips as the dough came out of the pan, which I could then cut in half before baking. That went a little better. They look like a mess on a pan, but at least they're a successful mess.

At this point, I realized that the dough was too crumbly. You might think I would have figured this out when I first tried to extrude the dough, but I thought it was supposed to be like that. I still don't know the correct dough texture for spritz cookies. It doesn't matter that I've now made literally every recipe that came with the cookie press. Maybe I will figure that out eventually.

For another batch, I tried cutting the dough off of the gun as it came out. About half of them looked so bad that I dropped them back in the mixing bowl. The remaining ones still didn't look all that great.

For my last batch, I decided to simply squirt strips that were as long as the pan, and then score them without moving them apart. In theory, I could break them up after baking. I know you're usually supposed to separate your cookies before they enter the oven, but sometimes I like to live dangerously. I should have made these cookies the "wrong" way the first time. They broke apart exactly where I cut them. Even those crackers with pre-scored lines don't separate so easily.

These cookies were really good on the first day. They were incredibly light, crisp without being hard, and with a perfect chocolate flavor that rivals the some really good brownies. But if you plan to make these ahead, you really need to store them airtight. Over the next day or so, they softened so much that they practically reverted to raw dough.