Fruit Bars
1/4 teaspoonful Cinnamon, 1/4 teaspoonful Nutmeg, 1 teaspoonful Salt, 6 oz. Cottolene or 1 Lard, teaspoonful The Great "Arm & Hammer" Soda. ¾ lb. Raisins, 1½ lb. cake Flour, 1. 1/4 teaspoonful Allspice.
Mix all together the same as for cookies into a stiff dough. Roll out with the hands into strips the thickness of a broomstick and the length of your cookie tins. Grease the pans and lay the strips in about three inches apart. Then press each strip flat, and wash with egg and milk mixed. Bake in a medium hot oven. When baked, cut into 3/4 inch slices.
A late-nineteenth-century keeping cookie, baked as long ropes and sliced after baking. The text has come through with some scrambled numbers, and it is missing a sweetener and a liquid, so treat it as a method to follow rather than a formula to weigh out.
- The recipe as printed is incompleteThere is no sugar, molasses, egg or milk in the ingredient list (egg and milk appear only later, in the wash), yet the dough must be mixed "the same as for cookies" and rolled by hand. Comparable spiced raisin bars of the period often carry molasses or brown sugar and eggs; without them you have seasoned flour and fat.
- QuantitiesThe raisins are 3/4 lb as printed. The flour line, "1½ lb. cake Flour, 1.", still appears to have swallowed a second figure; take 1½ lb of flour as roughly 5 1/2 cups and expect to adjust to reach a stiff dough.
- CottoleneA cottonseed-oil shortening sold by N. K. Fairbank & Co. and heavily advertised in the 1890s. Any solid vegetable shortening stands in for it; 6 oz is a little over 3/4 cup. The recipe offers lard as the alternative.
- The sodaOne teaspoon of bicarbonate needs an acid to work against: molasses, sour milk or brown sugar. Without one it can leave a soapy, faintly yellow taste. The branded capitalisation suggests the page comes from a booklet issued to sell soda.
- "A medium hot oven"Around 375F. The strips are thick and need to set through before the outside darkens; a hotter oven will crust them while the centres stay raw.
- Thickness of a broomstickAbout an inch in diameter before flattening. Pressed flat, each strip spreads to roughly two inches wide, which is why they are laid three inches apart.
- Egg and milk washOne egg beaten with a tablespoon or two of milk. It gives the glossy brown top that distinguishes these from plain drop cookies.
- Cut while warmSlice the strips on the pan as soon as they come out and are cool enough to handle. Left until cold, spiced raisin bars crack and crumble under the knife.
- YieldA batch on this scale fills two or three large sheets and gives several dozen 3/4-inch bars.
Arm & Hammer's little recipe booklets were premiums distributed with the soda, and their purpose was to put bicarbonate into as many household dishes as possible. That explains the branded capitalisation in the middle of the ingredient list. The dish itself belongs to a large family of American "bars" -- spiced, fruited doughs baked in long strips and cut after baking, a method that produced a firm, dry cookie built for the tin rather than the plate. Cottonseed shortening was pushed hard as a modern, economical substitute for animal fat from the 1890s onward, and cookbooks of that period often name it alongside lard so the cook can use whichever she has.