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Oatmeal Cookies
Two cups flour, two cups oatmeal, one cup lard and butter mixed together, one-half cup milk, two eggs, one cup sugar, one teaspoon cinnamon, one teaspoon baking powder in flour, one teaspoon soda in milk, one teaspoon salt; let stand two hours before baking, if possible.
— Mrs. Jacob Hollenbeck
A plain village cookie from the era when a cook was trusted to know her own oven. Nothing here is difficult, but the recipe gives no oven heat, no baking time, no yield, and no shaping method, so a few decisions have to be made for it.
- Oatmeal means rolled oatsOatmeal probably means rolled oats -- by the date of most books of this kind rolled oats were the usual household article, though "oatmeal" could still mean ground meal. Old-fashioned rolled oats are the safe choice; quick oats give a softer, sandier cookie and steel-cut oats will not soften in the short bake. Two cups of oats to two cups of flour makes a stiff, slightly dry dough.
- The fatOne cup of lard and butter mixed, in unstated proportions; half and half is a reasonable reading, and a cup of fat is about 8 oz. All butter works and tastes better to most modern palates; all shortening gives a puffier, blander cookie. Lard makes them notably tender and is worth trying if you have leaf lard.
- The soda wants sour milkThe soda wants an acid -- A teaspoon of soda dissolved in half a cup of sweet milk has little to react with and can leave a faint soapy edge. Sour or clabbered milk was often what a household had to hand, and buttermilk is the honest substitute here. If you use fresh milk, cut the soda to a quarter teaspoon and let the baking powder do the lifting.
- OvenNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, 350 to 375F, suits a rolled oat cookie; 10 to 12 minutes until the edges are set and the centres still look slightly underdone.
- The two-hour restThis is the instruction that matters. The oats need time to draw moisture from the milk and eggs, and the dough firms enough to handle. Skip it and the dough is sticky and the baked cookie gritty. Overnight in the refrigerator is better still.
- ShapingThe recipe gives none. The dough is stiff enough that it can be rolled and cut, and it can also be dropped in spoonfuls; either is defensible. If you roll it, doing so between sheets of parchment keeps the oats from tearing it.
- Sweetness and yieldOne cup of sugar across four cups of dry ingredients makes a cookie far less sweet than a modern one, closer to a tea biscuit. Expect roughly four dozen two-and-a-half-inch cookies. Raisins or chopped walnuts, common additions in these books, are not out of place.
Community cookbooks of this kind were often compiled to raise money, with recipes contributed by neighbours much as they wrote them down for one another. That may be why this one assumes so much: Mrs. Hollenbeck knew what her own stove did and had no reason to spell it out. Oatmeal in an American cookie is generally traced to the nineteenth century, following what is usually said to be the arrival of cheap rolled and steel-cut oats from large mills in the 1870s and 1880s, which turned oats from a slow-cooking porridge grain into something a baker could stir straight into a dough. The doubled leavening, soda slaked in milk plus baking powder in the flour, is the sort of thing one sees in recipes from the years when commercial baking powder was available alongside the older soda-and-sour-milk method, though what any individual cook made of the two can only be guessed at.