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#12 Navettes Sucreés (Sugar Shuttles) 1950

Cookies topped with sparkling sugar on left,
granulated sugar on right.
This cookie is almost as satisfying as the vanilla scent that fills the kitchen while baking.  Similar to the Christmas Butter Cookies, egg yolks contribute to their light, crumbly texture.

The name is a reference to the long thin device that guides yarn back and forth across the warp in weaving (or a device on a sewing machine). But these cookies look nothing like their name. Frankly, I would not expect anyone to take one look at these cookies and say, "I know - a weaving shuttle." Not happening.

Butter, eggs and vanilla await kneading
into dry flour, sugar and salt mixture.
I wonder if the recipe or cookie shape goes back to an era of early weavers, or if this was a 1950's invention for the magazine. The Cookie Book calls them "cigar-shaped," not an image I'd evoke to sell a cookie.

The making is easy. After rolling bits of dough into, shall we say, a small slug shape (I prefer my northwest image), you dip the tops into beaten egg white, then into sugar.

Cookie slugs - there must be a better shape.
About those extra egg whites: It is always nice to find a use for the whites when the recipe calls for yolks, but honestly, I have seen blog-rants about leftover whites. How hard is it to add extra whites to scrambled eggs the next morning? If you can't think of anything to do with egg whites, freeze them until you have enough for an angel food cake. Back to the recipe.

I tried sprinkling both regular sugar and the sparkling sugar that I used before on the Cinnamon  Sugar Crisps. In both cases, the sugar adds both texture and a welcome  sweetness to a relatively low-sugar recipe. For some reason, the granulated sugar-topped cookies baked to a light tan, whereas the sparkling sugar versions remained white, perhaps insulated by the thicker sugar crystals.

On the plus side were the vanilla flavor and a lightly crisp exterior, but the minus was the doughy center. An extra two minutes of baking, and continued oven temperature monitoring, did not remedy the problem. Nothing worse than an undercooked slug.

Even though the 1950's do not seem that long ago, I have to remember that kitchen equipment has changed since then.  Could my Air-Bake cookie sheet, with the extra layer of insulation on the bottom, be responsible?

The recipe is here and here.
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