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Nut Chocolate Drop Cookies
1/2 cup butter, 1 cup sugar, 2 eggs, 2 squares Walter Baker & Co.'s Premium No. 1 Chocolate, 1 cup chopped walnut meats, 1/4 teaspoonful salt, 1/4 teaspoonful vanilla, 2/3 cup flour.
Cream butter, and add sugar gradually, while beating constantly; then add eggs, well beaten, chocolate, melted, nut meats, salt, vanilla and flour. Drop from tip of spoon on a buttered sheet, one inch apart, and bake in a moderate oven.
A brownie batter thinned enough to spread on its own — the flour is deliberately scant. A few points on translating the chocolate and the oven.
- The chocolateWalter Baker's Premium No. 1 was unsweetened baking chocolate, and two "squares" meant two ounces. Use 2 oz of unsweetened chocolate, melted and slightly cooled so it does not scramble the eggs.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350F by the usual modern equivalence; the recipe gives no temperature. Check thin drop cookies like these early, at around 8 to 10 minutes, and pull them when the edges are set and the centers still look soft.
- Only 2/3 cup flourThat is not a misprint. The low flour ratio is what makes these spread thin and crisp at the edge with a fudgy middle; adding more turns them into ordinary cookies.
- SpacingOne inch apart is optimistic for a batter this loose. Give them two to three inches, or they will run together.
- Buttered sheetSubstitute parchment. These are high in sugar and low in flour, so they weld to a bare pan; let them firm on the sheet a minute before lifting.
- VanillaA quarter teaspoon is faint by current taste. A full teaspoon is more usual now, and the recipe tolerates it.
- YieldNone is given in the original; expect somewhere between three and five dozen small cookies dropped from a teaspoon.
Choice Recipes was one of a long series of promotional booklets issued by Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts — a chocolate mill dating to the late eighteenth century and, by 1900, the best-known American brand of the stuff. The phrasing here ("cream butter, and add sugar gradually, while beating constantly") reads like Fannie Farmer. Note that the chocolate is specified by trademarked square rather than by weight: a recipe written in Baker's squares quietly required Baker's chocolate. This batter — barely more than butter, sugar, eggs and chocolate held together by two-thirds of a cup of flour — is close kin to the brownie recipes appearing in New England cookbooks at the same time.