Home › Cakes, Cookies, Doughnuts › Boston Cookies
Boston Cookies
One cup of butter, one and one-half cups of sugar, three eggs, one teaspoon of soda, one and one-half tablespoons of hot water, three and one-fourth cups of flour, one-half teaspoon of salt, one teaspoon of cinnamon, one cup of chopped walnuts, one-half cup of currants, one-half cup of seeded chopped raisins. Cream the butter, add the sugar gradually and eggs well beaten. Add soda dissolved in water, half the flour mixed and sifted with salt and cinnamon, then add nut meats, fruit and remaining flour. Drop by spoonfuls one inch apart on a buttered sheet and bake in a moderate oven. -Fannie M. Farmer. See Page XVIII.
A stiff drop cookie of the sort Fannie Farmer taught by the hundred at the Boston Cooking School. It behaves like a modern spice cookie, but a few of the directions need translating.
- Moderate ovenBake at 350-375F. Small drop cookies of this richness need only 10-12 minutes; pull them when the edges are set and the centers still look soft.
- SpacingOne inch apart was written for a buttered sheet and dough dropped from a spoon; the recipe does not say what size spoon. If your mounds are large, allow two inches between them or they will run together.
- Soda in hot waterDissolving the soda in water before adding it helps distribute it evenly through a dough too stiff to disperse dry powder, so follow the step as written. There is little acid in the dough, so the soda contributes mainly to browning and spread rather than acting as a strong leavener.
- CurrantsThese are Zante currants, the small dried grape, not fresh red or black currants. Dried cranberries are not a substitute in flavor, though they will work texturally.
- Seeded raisins"Seeded" means the seeds have been removed. Any ordinary seedless raisin covers it; chop them so they distribute.
- Flour measureThree and one-fourth cups of flour is roughly 13 oz / 380 g at modern sifted-flour weights, though cup measures vary a good deal. Measure by weight if the dough seems dry, and hold back a little of the last addition.
- Salt and butterThe half teaspoon of salt suits unsalted butter. Period butter was often salted, so if you use salted butter, taste and consider reducing the salt to a scant quarter teaspoon.
- Yield and handlingAbout five dozen small cookies. If the kitchen is warm the dough will slump; a half hour in the refrigerator gives thicker cookies.
Fannie Merritt Farmer ran the Boston Cooking School and later her own school on Huntington Avenue, and her name on a recipe in a turn-of-the-century American cookbook functioned much as a brand does now — a guarantee that the proportions had been tested and written down in level measurements rather than handfuls. "Boston cookies" is a house name rather than a regional specialty: the formula is the standard creamed-butter drop cookie of the period, enriched with walnuts, raisins and currants and spiced with cinnamon, and it appears under that title in Farmer's own Boston Cooking-School Cook Book. The type belongs to the era when dried fruit and nuts were the cheapest way to make a plain dough feel like a treat; chocolate chips were still decades off, and a cookie earned its keep with cinnamon and raisins.