Gourmet's Favorite Cookie Recipes: 1941-2008. Retested but unchanged.

The Brown Butter cookies above, from 1961, call for 2/3 cup sugar and 1 tablespoon vanilla sugar. That's made from a vanilla bean that sits in sugar for a while. Don't let the lack of it stop you. The workaround:

1 tbsp of homemade Vanilla Sugar = 2 tsp vanilla extract plus 2 tsp white sugar

It's still snowing hard out there, the streets silent because it's Sunday. There's at least a foot, probably more but it's hard to tell how much because it's drifting to three feet in spots. The forecast calls for snow into the afternoon, after "areas of blowing snow with patchy freezing fog early this morning."

Baking will keep the house warm till the Pats game begins at 1 p.m.

Update: I made the Brown Butter cookies above. If you read the comments on the recipe, bakers note the difficulty of working the pebbly dough. We let it rest, as suggested, to let the flour absorb what it could, and made small marbles. They were overdone after 15 minutes.

Nevertheless, the flavor of the browned butter dough was worth the effort. As my daughter and I eyed the rest of the batter, my brother strongly suggested we add an egg and chocolate chips and bake it.

We did, and the flavor of the cookie part was superior.

The lack of liquid makes this a trickier recipe than I had expected, but with some respect for the chemistry involved, it could become my favorite.