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Oatmeal Cookies
1 1/4 cupfuls sugar 1 cupful Crisco 3 cupfuls rolled oats 2 eggs 1/2 cupful sour milk 1 teaspoonful powdered cinnamon 1 teaspoonful powdered ginger 1 cupful stoned chopped dates 1 teaspoonful baking soda 2 cupfuls flour 1 teaspoonful salt Cream Crisco and sugar thoroughly together, add eggs well-beaten, rolled oats, dates, salt, spices, soda dissolved in milk, and flour. Mix and drop from spoon on Criscoed baking tins. Bake in moderate oven from ten to twelve minutes.
Sufficient for forty-five cookies.
A straightforward drop cookie from a shortening-company cookbook, and it works as written once a few 1910s conventions are translated.
- CriscoHydrogenated vegetable shortening, then brand new and the whole point of this book. Modern Crisco has been reformulated to cut trans fat but behaves the same in creaming; an equal weight of any solid vegetable shortening works, and butter gives more flavour with slightly more spread.
- "Criscoed baking tins"Simply greased with shortening. Parchment on a flat sheet is easier and gives more even bottoms.
- Moderate ovenConventionally taken as somewhere around 350-375F. At that heat 10 to 12 minutes is right for a spoon-sized mound; the edges should be set and the centres still soft.
- Sour milkNaturally soured raw milk, which pasteurised milk will not reproduce. Use buttermilk, or a half cup of milk with a teaspoon and a half of lemon juice or vinegar left to stand five minutes. The acid is what the soda reacts with, so do not swap in plain milk.
- Soda dissolved in milkDissolving prevents brown flecks and dead spots. The recipe adds it near the end, just before the flour; get the trays into the oven reasonably promptly, since the leavening starts working on contact.
- Rolled oatsOld-fashioned rolled oats, not quick or instant. Three cupfuls is a lot of oat against two of flour, which is why the dough is stiff and the cookies stay chewy rather than spreading thin.
- Stoned datesPitted. Buy pitted dates and check for stray stones; chop them small or they clump. Tossing them in a spoonful of the measured flour keeps them separated.
- Yield and sizeThe recipe claims forty-five cookies, which from this quantity of dough means a generous heaped spoonful each, spaced about two inches apart. Larger mounds need a couple of extra minutes.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, which came on the American market in 1911; the recipes are built around the product, which is why shortening appears here in place of the butter or lard an earlier cookbook would have called for. The oatmeal drop cookie itself is older than the shortening, belonging to the wave of home baking that followed the spread of cheap commercial rolled oats in the late nineteenth century, when oats moved from porridge into cakes and biscuits. Sour milk with soda was a common household leavening of the period, a way of using milk that had turned before refrigeration was widespread, and dates were among the dried fruits widely available in American groceries by this date.