Bran Cookies
1/2 cup brown sugar, pressed down 1/3 cup crisco 2 teaspoons molasses 1/3 cup currants 1/3 cup walnut meats, cut fine 1 egg 3/4 cup sifted pastry flour, shaken down 3/4 cup bran A few grains salt Rub the shortening to a cream. Add the sugar, molasses, and salt, and beat till it is light and creamy, then add the egg, and beat well. Stir in the flour, bran, nuts, and currants. Oil the hands, and form the dough into balls with the hands. Lay the balls on an oiled pan, flatten them to a thickness of one-fourth inch, then bake them.
A plain drop-and-flatten cookie from the era when bran was newly fashionable as a health food. The original gives no oven setting and no baking time, so those are the first things to supply.
- Oven and timeBake at 375F. At a quarter-inch thick these are thin and small, so check at 10 minutes and expect 10-14 minutes total; they should be set and browned at the edges.
- CriscoVegetable shortening, and the recipe is written for it — an all-shortening dough spreads little and stays pale. Butter in the same volume works but will brown faster and spread more.
- "Rub the shortening to a cream"Means beat the solid shortening alone until smooth and aerated before any sugar goes in. With a stand mixer this is a minute on medium; the creaming stage and the beaten egg carry the lift between them, as there is no chemical leavener in the list.
- Pastry flour, shaken downPastry flour is lower in protein than all-purpose. If you substitute all-purpose, use 3/4 cup less about 1 tablespoon. "Shaken down" most likely means the sifted flour was settled and levelled in the cup rather than packed.
- BranPlain unprocessed wheat bran from the baking or bulk aisle, not bran breakfast cereal, which is sweetened and already formed into flakes or sticks.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, a small raisin — not fresh black or red currants. If they are hard, soak in hot water for ten minutes and pat dry before stirring in.
- ShapingOiling the hands is there because the dough is sticky and stiff; a small scoop and a dampened glass bottom do the same job. Flatten to a genuine quarter inch, since the dough will barely spread on its own.
- YieldDepends entirely on how big the balls are rolled; at the specified quarter-inch thickness this makes a sizeable batch. They keep a week in a tin and firm up considerably as they cool.
Bran moved from the mill's by-product heap to the pantry shelf in the first decades of the twentieth century, when digestive health and "roughage" became a preoccupation of American domestic science writers and breakfast-cereal makers alike. Cookies like this one are the result: a small sweet built on the same reasoning as bran muffins and bran bread, with molasses and currants doing the work of making the coarse flakes palatable. The use of Crisco dates the recipe fairly closely as well — the hydrogenated vegetable shortening was introduced in 1911 and named outright in household cookbooks for decades afterward, where an older book would simply have said lard or butter.