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Oatmeal Macaroons
Two tablespoons of butter.
Two tablespoons of butter. One cup of sugar. Two eggs One-half teaspoon of Larkin Table Salt. Two eggs One cup of sugar One-half teaspoon of Larkin Table Salt One teaspoon of Larkin Baking Powder Three cups of rolled oats Cream the butter and sugar, add eggs well beaten but not separated, salt, rolled oats and baking powder. Bake in a hot oven until brown and crisp.
A flourless drop cookie held together by nothing but egg, sugar and oats, so the batter looks alarmingly loose and sandy until it sets in the oven. Handle it as a spoon-dropped cookie, not a rolled one.
- The hinge: let the mixture standFreshly mixed, the oats are dry and the batter will not cohere. Ten to fifteen minutes of rest lets the oats absorb the egg and sugar, after which the mixture holds together when pressed into mounds.
- "A hot oven"In books of this period that is usually reckoned somewhere around 400-450F. With three cups of oats and only two tablespoons of butter, the edges scorch fast at that heat; 375F for 10-12 minutes gives the brown, crisp result the recipe asks for.
- Larkin salt and baking powderLarkin of Buffalo sold its own branded groceries direct to households, with furniture and household goods given as club premiums; the brand names carry no special meaning. Use ordinary table salt and any double-acting baking powder in the same amounts.
- Rolled oatsOld-fashioned rolled oats, not instant or quick-cooking. Instant oats are rolled thinner and more fully pre-cooked, and are likelier to absorb the liquid into a paste than to stay as distinct flakes.
- No flourThis is not an oversight. The cookie is bound by egg and sugar alone, which is why it is best dropped in small mounds; larger ones are liable to spread and stay soft in the middle.
- PanThe recipe does not say, but a greased tin is the likely intention. Parchment is easier here, as the high-sugar, low-fat batter sticks stubbornly and the thin cookies tear when lifted.
- Yield and coolingNo yield is given; expect several dozen small macaroons from this quantity. They are pliable straight from the oven and crisp as they cool, so leave them on the sheet a minute or two before moving them.
The name is borrowed rather than literal: a true macaroon is almond paste, egg white and sugar, and by the late nineteenth century American cookbooks had extended the word to almost any flourless, crisp drop cookie built on a nut or grain — coconut, oatmeal. Rolled oats made the substitution easy and cheap. Steel rollers had turned oats from a long-boiling porridge grain into a quick, shelf-stable flake in the later decades of the nineteenth century, and the oat millers seem to have had an interest in their product being seen as a baking ingredient rather than just breakfast. The Larkin brand names in the ingredient list place this recipe in that promotional world too: Larkin of Buffalo sold soap and groceries direct to households through club plans, giving away furniture and cookbooks as premiums, and a recipe booklet naming Larkin salt and Larkin baking powder in the same breath was doing advertising as much as instruction.