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Hermits
2 eggs 1 cup (large) sugar ¾ cup shortening ¾ cup sour milk ¾ teaspoon soda ½ teaspoon cinnamon 1½ cups Five Roses flour 1½ cups oatmeal ½ cup chopped raisins 1 cup walnuts (chopped).
Drop from spoon onto buttered pan and bake. They should spread out like cookies.
Note on Drop Cakes-This class of cake bakes very well on buttered paper in baking pan.
A soft, cakey drop cookie of the kind Canadian mills promoted to sell flour by the barrel. The original gives no oven temperature and no baking time, which is the main thing you have to supply.
- Oven and timeThe original gives neither. Bake at 375F for 10 to 12 minutes, until the edges are set and the centres still look slightly soft; drop cakes with this much sugar do better a little hotter and faster.
- The stray ingredient listThe four items after the note on drop cakes -- 1½ cups sugar, ½ cup molasses, 1 cup butter, ½ cup milk -- are not part of the hermits; they appear to be a fragment of an adjoining recipe carried over in transcription. Ignore them.
- Sour milk and sodaSour milk here is naturally soured raw milk, acidic enough to activate the ¾ teaspoon of soda. Use buttermilk cup for cup, or ¾ cup milk with 2 teaspoons lemon juice or vinegar stirred in and left to stand ten minutes. Sweet milk will leave the cookies flat and faintly soapy.
- ShorteningIn this period shortening commonly meant lard, or a lard-and-butter mixture; modern vegetable shortening works and gives a softer cookie, butter gives more flavour and a little more spread. Measure ¾ cup solid, not melted.
- OatmealRolled oats, not steel-cut and not instant. Old-fashioned large-flake oats give the texture the recipe intends.
- Buttered paperThe note about baking on buttered paper in the pan is the period equivalent of parchment. Parchment paper needs no greasing; a silicone mat also works.
- SpreadingThe dough should be soft enough to drop from a spoon and slump. If it holds a peak, add a tablespoon of the soured milk; if it runs thin, chill it twenty minutes before baking.
- YieldAbout three dozen cookies from rounded tablespoons, spaced two inches apart. They keep four or five days in a tin and stay soft.
Hermits are a North American spiced drop cookie documented in New England and Maritime cookbooks from the later nineteenth century onward; the name is unexplained, though it is often said to refer to their brown, plain, hooded appearance or to how well they keep -- they are traditionally said to have been a standard cookie for sailors, lumber camps and school lunch pails because molasses, spice and dried fruit hold moisture for days. This version, from the Five Roses Cook Book published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, is the oatmeal branch of the family: no molasses, but sour milk and soda for lift and a cup of walnuts. Books of this sort were promotional, distributed cheaply to households that bought the company's flour, and the recipes came largely from readers' own kitchens, which explains the shorthand.