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Oatmeal Cakes (Mrs S W Sprague)
— Mrs. S. W. Sprague
One-half cup sugar, one-third cup butter, one egg (stir this until light and creamy), one scant cup flour, one-third teaspoon soda dissolved in a little hot water, one-half teaspoon salt, one-half teaspoon cinnamon, one scant cup rolled oatmeal, one-half cup shredded raisins, one-half cup chopped nuts; drop by teaspoonfuls on a buttered pan, and bake in a quick oven.
— Mrs. Charles L. Van Loan
A plain drop cookie of the kind that filled community cookbooks around 1900, before "cookie" became the standard word for it. The batter is stiff and comes together in one bowl.
- Quick ovenA "quick oven" in period cookbooks is generally reckoned at around 400-425F, hotter than modern drop cookies want. At that heat small oatmeal cookies can scorch on the bottom before the centre sets; 375F for 10-12 minutes is a reasonable modern equivalent.
- Rolled oatmealThis means rolled oats, not cooked porridge and not steel-cut. Old-fashioned rolled oats are the closest match; quick oats will work but give a softer, more uniform crumb.
- Soda in hot waterDissolving the soda in a spoonful of hot water is common in receipts of this period, and is usually explained by the coarseness of the soda then sold. With modern fine baking soda the third teaspoon can be whisked straight into the flour.
- Scant cup"Scant" means just under a level cup; how much under is not fixed, though a spoonful or so short is the usual reading. With only a third of a cup of butter in the batch, erring toward less flour keeps the cookie from drying out.
- Shredded raisinsNineteenth-century raisins were often seeded and torn by hand so the fruit spread through the dough. Modern seedless raisins need only a rough chop, or none at all.
- Buttered panThere is no leavening beyond the soda and the dough is sticky; parchment on the sheet does the job better than butter, which encourages spreading and browning at the edges.
- YieldTeaspoon-sized drops from this quantity give somewhere in the region of 30-45 small cookies. Leave space between them, as the dough spreads a little as the butter melts.
- Two namesThe receipt carries one name above it and another below it. Doubled attributions like this are common in subscription cookbooks and are as often a printing or layout artefact -- the trailing credit of the preceding receipt -- as evidence of two contributors; which it is here cannot be told from the page.
Community cookbooks like this one, sold to raise money for a church or library, are a valuable record of what ordinary American households baked. Oatmeal appears in them with increasing frequency from the 1880s onward: rolled oats had become a cheap, widely distributed packaged good, and the milling companies promoted them for more than breakfast. A cookie built on oats, raisins and chopped nuts stretched a small amount of butter and sugar a long way.