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Oatmeal Cookies
1 egg 1/2 cup fine oatmeal 1/4 cup sugar 2 cups flour 1/4 cup thin cream 2 teaspoons baking powder 1/4 cup milk 1 teaspoon salt Beat egg until light, add sugar, cream, and milk; then add oatmeal, flour, baking powder, and salt, mixed and sifted. Toss on a floured board, roll, cut in shape, and bake in a moderate oven.
A plain rolled cookie with barely a quarter cup of sugar for two cups of flour — closer to a tea biscuit or a cracker than to anything a modern cook would call a cookie. Handle it like a rolled biscuit dough and it behaves well.
- Don't overwork the doughWith this little sugar and fat, the dough tightens quickly and the cookies turn tough. Toss on the board, roll once to about 1/4 inch, and gather scraps only a single time.
- Fine oatmealThis means finely ground oats, not the flakes sold as rolled or old-fashioned oats. Pulse rolled oats in a food processor until they are the texture of coarse flour, or buy oat flour.
- Thin creamPeriod usage for what is now sold as light cream, about 18 to 20 percent butterfat. Half-and-half is the nearest supermarket match; heavy cream will make a richer, shorter cookie.
- Moderate oven350 to 375F. At that heat, 1/4-inch rounds need only 10 to 12 minutes — take them out when the edges are just golden, since they carry very little sugar to brown with and will dry out fast.
- SaltA full teaspoon in two cups of flour is assertive by modern taste. Half a teaspoon suits most palates now.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons of modern double-acting powder is correct for this quantity of flour. Sift it with the flour, oatmeal, and salt as directed rather than adding it to the wet mixture.
- YieldAbout three dozen two-inch rounds. They keep well in a tin and firm up as they sit.
Oat cookies of this kind sit at the boundary between baking and breadmaking: with a quarter cup of sugar to two cups of flour, they are a rolled and cut biscuit that happens to be sweetened. Fine oatmeal was a staple of Scottish and northern English baking long before oats became an American breakfast cereal, and turn-of-the-century cookery books often used it alongside wheat flour. Oats were also widely promoted as a healthful food in this period, and a plain, keeping cookie made partly of oatmeal could be offered to children and invalids.