Snowballs

(the card is headed "Snowballs" at the left and "Cookies 2009" at the right)

Ingredients

• ½ lb. unsalted butter
• 4 tbs. sugar
• 2 cups sifted flour
• 3 oz. chopped pecans

Method

Cream butter and sugar. Add flour (might take a little more.) Add nuts. Shape into small balls (underlined on the card). Place on ungreased cookie sheet. Bake @ 15 to 20 minutes at 350°. Cool (underlined). Roll in powdered sugar and put into paper cups.

Notes

★ THE ONLY DATED CARD IN THE BOX SO FAR

"Cookies 2009" is written in the top-right corner — a heading rather than a note, which suggests this card came out of a batch someone labelled by year, probably a Christmas baking list. It is the first hard date the Recipes wing has had from the handwriting itself, and it puts at least part of this box firmly in living memory. Recorded in doc_date rather than left unknown.

Worth asking: was there a "Cookies 2009" set? If other cards carry a year in that corner, the box has an internal chronology nobody has noticed yet.

Two instructions are underlined by the writer and both are the ones that go wrong: small balls (they do not spread, so large ones stay raw in the middle) and cool before rolling (roll them hot and the sugar dissolves into a glaze).

"(might take a little more.)" about the flour is a cook writing honestly about a dough they know varies. Kept.

Only 4 tablespoons of sugar to half a pound of butter — this is the barely-sweet Mexican wedding cookie / Russian tea cake, which gets its sweetness from the powdered sugar coating rather than the dough. The proportion looks wrong to a modern eye and is correct.

The finish — "put into paper cups" — is a gift-tin instruction. These were made to be given away.