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Chocolate Nut and Fruit Cookies
1/3 cup Cottolene. 1 cup sugar. 1/4 cup grated chocolate. 2 extra tablespoons sugar. 2 tablespoons boiling water. 2 eggs well beaten. 1 cup nut meats chopped. 1 cup raisins seeded and shredded. 2¼ cups flour. 3 tablespoons baking powder. 1/4 teaspoon salt.
PROCESS: Cream Cottolene, add sugar gradually, stirring constantly. Melt chocolate over hot water, add the two extra tablespoons sugar and boiling water. Cook one minute; when cool add to first mixture. Add beaten eggs. Mix and sift flour (reserving one-fourth cup), baking powder and salt. Add to cake mixture. Add fruit and nut meats dredged with remaining flour. Chill mixture. Drop from spoon onto a well-greased baking sheet one and one-half inches apart; press a raisin or the half a nut meat in center of each cake and bake in a moderate oven. 1/3 cup Cottolene. 1 cup fine sugar.
A straightforward drop cookie from a shortening manufacturer's cookbook, with one measurement that almost certainly went wrong at the typesetter.
- The baking powderThree tablespoons for 2¼ cups of flour is several times any workable amount and would leave a bitter, metallic taste and a collapsed cookie. Three teaspoons is the likeliest intended figure; treat the printed amount as probably an error.
- CottoleneA brand of shortening made from cottonseed oil hardened with beef fat, sold in pails and no longer made. Any solid vegetable shortening substitutes cup for cup; butter works too, though the cookies will spread a little more.
- Grated chocolateThis means unsweetened block chocolate grated on a box grater, not cocoa powder and not chips. A quarter cup grated is roughly 1 oz. Chopping it fine and melting it is easier than grating.
- The chocolate pasteMelting the chocolate with sugar and boiling water and cooking it a minute makes a smooth syrup that disperses evenly through the batter. Let it cool to barely warm before it meets the creamed shortening, or the fat will soften and the mixture may separate.
- Dredging the fruitReserving a quarter cup of the flour to coat the raisins and nuts helps keep them from clumping and sinking rather than being evenly distributed.
- ChillingAn hour in the refrigerator firms the dough enough to drop cleanly and limits spread. The instruction is easy to overlook but it is what keeps these from running together.
- OvenThe book gives no temperature; "a moderate oven" is usually taken as about 350-375°F. Drop cookies of this size will take roughly 10 to 12 minutes; they should look set at the edges and still soft at the center.
- YieldNo yield is given; a batch this size makes several dozen small drop cookies. The spacing given, an inch and a half, suits that size.
- The trailing lineThe repeated "1/3 cup Cottolene. 1 cup fine sugar" at the end is a printing artifact, most likely the head of the next recipe in the book. Ignore it.
52 Sunday Dinners (1913) was written by Elizabeth O. Hiller, a Chicago cooking-school teacher, and issued by the N. K. Fairbank Company to promote Cottolene, its cottonseed-oil shortening. Cottonseed oil had gone from a by-product of cotton processing to a cheap kitchen fat in the late nineteenth century, and manufacturers pushed it hard against lard with exactly this kind of book: a full year of menus in which the branded product appears throughout. The cookie itself belongs to the American drop-cookie tradition that expanded once chemical leavening and reliable ranges were common.