Recipe for Success, Cookie-wise

     We're hoping.  With August coming to an end, it's time---time to make the cookies, or the cookie dough anyway. The Schaghticoke Fair is just a few weeks away.  One of its long-time  exhibitors was in the house, and available for the first venture---sugar cookies.  The recipe we traditionally use calls for shortening, and there was none in the house.  I've pretty much switched to using margarine or olive oil in its place, wanting to avoid the dread animal fats.    But I didn't want to chance having the cookies be too oily or too flat, so I searched for another recipe.  The best I could do was a recipe which called for half a cup of butter and half a cup of shortening, and we decided to use margarine in place of the shortening.
      The recipe is called "Crisp Sugar Drop Cookies."  The biggest challenge was trying to grate lemon rind, a new venture for the entrant, especially since he had to use a cheese grater, and the lemon had an especially firm rind, or so it seemed.  The recipe also called for 2 tablespoonfuls of vinegar, but since he had already attacked a lemon, we used lemon juice instead.  All the other steps went well, and we test-baked half a dozen cookies before storing the rest of the dough in the refrigerator.  The cookies passed the taste test with flying colors, first place for sure, the 3 of us in the house decided, or maybe that decision was only mine.
    I took another look at the recipe booklet, which had been stored in my cookie recipe file, and most likely never used.  Time was when I fully expected to use every single recipe I collected, the same as when I had every expectation that someday I would have used all the recipes in my Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook, a wedding gift in 1968.  I've used that book thousands of times, but actually have only explored a small percentage of its offerings.  But back to today's recipe.  The booklet is titled, "New Fashioned Old-Fashioned Recipes."  It is copyrighted 1951, and every recipe in it calls for Arm & Hammer Brand or Cow Brand Baking Soda, and also vinegar.  What? we ask.  Vinegar?  So I turn to the forward page in the little pamphlet, and find the explanation, by Martha Lee Anderson of the Home Economics Department of Church & Dwight Co., Inc. in New York, N.Y. (No zip code, not yet)
       She writes, "I think most of us have a warm spot in our memories for some special food, which, long ago, nobody could ever bake so well as Grandmother.  Chances are it was Baking Soda which made those old-time baked goods so extra light and tender, moist and delicious.  To get them that way took real skill, because Grandmother's leavening was provided by Baking Soda and sour milk, with  its variable acidity.  Today, there's a new way of using Baking Soda, which produces fine, uniform results.  This new way calls for Baking Soda and vinegar.  Because of the fairly uniform acidity of vinegar, the use of this new method is dependable.  The vinegar releases the same amount of leavening gas from Baking Soda.  I hope you will follow the new-fashioned way to old-fashioned goodness with the recipes in this book!"  
    It's probably a safe bet to assume Martha Lee has probably long since stopped caring about whether the combination of vinegar and Baking Soda ever made its way into the annals of good cooking.  She, if ever an actual person, has provided Ben with valuable insights into chemistry as well as enhancement of  his baking skills.  Maybe someday in chemistry class he can follow up on the difference between the variable acidity of sour milk as opposed to the more uniform  acidity of  vinegar.  And maybe even gain further insight into how vinegar releases leavening gas from baking soda.  That process used to fascinate him and his brother when they were toddlers---I think they called it making a volcano back then.
  P.S. I do feel a certain amount of guilt for having substituted lemon juice,