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Boston Cookies
1 cup butter 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 1/2 cups sugar 1 teaspoon cinnamon 3 eggs 1 cup chopped nut meat, hickory or English walnut 1 teaspoon soda 1 1/2 tablespoons hot water 1/2 cup currants 3 1/4 cups flour 1/2 cup raisins, seeded and chopped Cream the butter, add sugar gradually, and eggs well beaten. Add soda dissolved in hot water, and one-half the flour mixed and sifted with salt and cinnamon; then add nut meat, fruit, and remaining flour. Drop by spoonfuls one inch apart on a buttered sheet, and bake in a moderate oven.
A rich drop cookie of the Boston Cooking-School type: creamed butter, a soda-and-hot-water leavening, and a heavy load of nuts and dried fruit. The original assumes you know how long cookies take, so the numbers below fill that gap.
- Moderate ovenBake at 350F. Drop cookies of this size take 10 to 13 minutes, until the edges are set and lightly browned but the centres still look soft.
- SpacingOne inch apart is too close for modern baking sheets and a batter this rich; the cookies spread. Allow two inches and expect to bake in batches.
- Soda in hot waterDissolving the soda in 1 1/2 tablespoons hot water is the leavening. There is no obvious acid in the batter, so the lift comes from the soda breaking down in the oven's heat, plus steam and the air beaten into the creamed butter.
- Hickory nutsHickory nuts were a common farm and market nut in the United States and are hard to buy now. The recipe already offers English walnuts as the alternative; pecans behave the same way.
- Currants and raisins"Currants" here means dried Zante currants, not fresh berries. "Seeded" raisins simply means the seeds removed, which modern raisins already are, so chop and use as they come.
- Butter and saltA cup is 8 oz, two sticks. If you are using modern salted butter, you may want to cut the half teaspoon of salt to a scant quarter teaspoon.
- Flour3 1/4 cups is roughly 14 oz if spooned lightly into the cup, and closer to 16 oz if you scoop and level. Spoon it in if you are not weighing, or the dough turns dry and the cookies stay domed.
- YieldRoughly four to five dozen cookies from a rounded tablespoon of dough each. They keep well in a tin for several days and firm up as they cool.
Boston Cookies belong to the family of spiced, fruited drop cookies popularised through the Boston Cooking-School and the domestic-science cookbooks that followed it around the turn of the twentieth century, and recipes under this name recur with small variations in the fruit and nuts. The name marks the style rather than any single origin: soda dissolved in hot water instead of baking powder, a generous proportion of butter and sugar, and hickory or English walnut as the nut.