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.