Home › Recipes › Drop Nut or Fruit Cookies
Drop Nut or Fruit Cookies
Observe the proportions and directions for Drop Cookies, adding a half cupful of chopped nut-meats (any kind) or mixed, chopped, dried fruit, as raisins, currants, candied orange peel, etc. 11/2 Cupfuls Sugar
This is a variation entry rather than a standalone recipe: it sends you back to the book's Drop Cookies for the base dough, and the stray "1 1/2 Cupfuls Sugar" is a fragment of that ingredient list that drifted onto the page. Assume a plain creamed drop-cookie dough of roughly 1/2 cup shortening, 1 1/2 cups sugar, 2 eggs, milk, about 3 cups flour and a chemical leavener.
- You need the base recipeNothing here works on its own. Find the book's Drop Cookies formula, or use any creamed drop-cookie dough of similar scale, and fold the half cup of additions in at the very end, after the flour.
- Nut-meatsSimply shelled nuts, chopped. The recipe leaves the kind open; walnuts, pecans and hickory nuts would all suit. Toasting them first is optional and improves the flavour.
- Currants are not the fresh berryDried Zante currants, a small seedless grape, sold beside the raisins. If you use fresh red or black currants the dough will go wet and the cookies will spread.
- Candied orange peelChop it fine; it was often sold in large stiff pieces. If it is dry and hard, soak it briefly in hot water and pat dry, or it will stay gritty in the baked cookie.
- Flour the fruitToss the dried fruit with a spoonful of the measured flour before folding it in. Otherwise it clumps and sinks against the pan, where the sugar in it scorches.
- Oven and timingThe page gives no oven direction; follow the base Drop Cookies recipe. Failing that, drop cookies of this type are usually baked around 350 to 375F for 10 to 12 minutes, until the edges colour and the centres are just set. Dried fruit and candied peel darken fast, so watch the last two minutes rather than the clock.
- YieldDepending on the base dough, a mix built on 1 1/2 cups sugar should give something in the region of four dozen cookies dropped by rounded teaspoonfuls, spaced two inches apart.
Rather than print a second full cookie recipe, the book leans on the first and offers a variation: one plain creamed dough, then whatever the pantry held stirred through it. The list of additions is a fair inventory of an early twentieth-century American store cupboard, where raisins, Zante currants and candied orange peel kept well and nuts were often gathered rather than bought.