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Oatmeal Drops
3 cups oatmeal 3 cups Five Roses flour 2 cups brown sugar 1 cup raisins (seeded and chopped) 1 teaspoon cinnamon 1 cup melted butter 2 eggs (well beaten) 1 teaspoon soda dissolved in ½ 1/2 cup sour milk.
Mix all dry ingredients together, then add other materials. Drop by teaspoons on greased tin and bake in moderate oven.
One cup walnut meats may be added, if desired.
A stiff, sturdy drop cookie of the sour-milk-and-soda school. Nothing here is obscure, but three details in the wording will change your results.
- Oatmeal means rolled oatsIn a drop cookie of this period "oatmeal" is almost certainly rolled oats rather than the fine Scottish or Irish meal. Old-fashioned rolled oats give the right chew; quick oats work but flatten the texture, and steel-cut will stay raw.
- Moderate ovenBake at 350F. These are small and dense, so 10 to 13 minutes is plenty — pull them when the edges are set and the centres still look slightly soft.
- Sour milkSour milk in this period meant clabbered raw milk, mildly acidic. Use buttermilk, or stir 1½ teaspoons of lemon juice or white vinegar into ½ cup of milk and let it stand five minutes. It is not optional; the acid is what activates the soda.
- Soda goes in lastDissolve the teaspoon of soda in the sour milk only when everything else is combined, then mix and get the trays into the oven promptly. The lift begins on contact and does not wait.
- Butter measureA cup of butter is 8 oz, two American sticks. The recipe asks for it melted, so melt that quantity and use it all.
- Raisins"Seeded and chopped" reflects a time when raisins came with seeds. Modern seedless raisins need only a rough chop, or none at all if you like them whole.
- Flour, and the stiffness of the doughDepending on how the flour is measured, 3 cups is roughly 13 to 15 oz. The dough is meant to be thick enough to hold its shape from a spoon — if it is dry and crumbling rather than sticky, add sour milk a tablespoon at a time.
- Yield and pansThis is a large batch; teaspoon-sized drops will run well past five dozen, with proportionally fewer from a rounded tablespoon. Parchment does the work of the greased tin with less spread.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company as advertising for its flour, and was compiled from recipes contributed by Canadian users of the flour. The soda-and-sour-milk pairing that raises these drops was a common leavening in rural North American kitchens well into the twentieth century, when sour milk was a by-product of keeping a cow. Oatmeal cookies of this kind — brown sugar, raisins, cinnamon, an optional cup of walnuts — are a staple of regional community cookbooks of the period under a variety of names.