Home › Small Cakes of All Kinds › Oatmeal Macaroons
Oatmeal Macaroons
3 cups rolled oats 1 cup sugar 2 eggs 2 tablespoons butter 2 teaspoons baking powder 1 tablespoon milk.
Five Roses flour to make into small balls.
Bake in hot oven on greased pan. 2 eggs
A thin, sketchy formula of the kind that assumes the cook already knows what a macaroon dough should feel like. The flour is left entirely to judgment, so the hinge is dough consistency rather than any measurement.
- The flour is undefined"Five Roses flour to make into small balls" means you add just enough that the mixture holds a shape when squeezed; a few tablespoons is likely to be enough, but the dough, not a measurement, is the guide. Add it a spoonful at a time; too much turns these from chewy macaroons into dry oat biscuits.
- Hot ovenIn a book of this period a hot oven is usually taken as somewhere around 400-450F. At that heat small balls of oat dough should be done in roughly 8-12 minutes, so watch the edges rather than the clock.
- The stray "2 eggs"The line is repeated at the end, apparently a duplication rather than a second addition. Use two eggs total, not four.
- Rolled oatsUse old-fashioned rolled oats. Quick oats absorb the single tablespoon of milk and the eggs faster and give a pastier dough; steel-cut oats will not soften at all in this short bake.
- Butter quantityTwo tablespoons of fat for three cups of oats is very lean by modern cookie standards. The eggs are doing the binding, so mix thoroughly and let the dough stand five minutes before shaping to let the oats hydrate.
- Greased panGrease well or use parchment. With so little butter in the dough these stick readily, and they are fragile until fully cool.
- Yield and sizeExpect about 30 to 36 cookies from walnut-sized balls. They spread only slightly, so flatten them a little if you want a crisper macaroon.
Despite the name, these have no almonds and no meringue — by the early twentieth century "macaroon" is generally said to have loosened in North American home cookbooks to mean any small, rough-surfaced drop cake bound largely with egg, whether the body came from coconut, cornflakes or oats. The recipe belongs to the era when rolled oats had become a cheap, heavily advertised breakfast staple and cooks were encouraged to find further uses for the barrel in the pantry. Its appearance in the Five Roses Cook Book is characteristic of that book's origins: the volume was issued by a Canadian flour miller and advertised as compiled from recipes sent in by users across the country.