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Cookies, Cakes, and Doughnuts: Cream
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 an inch apart on a buttered sheet, and bake in a moderate oven.-FANNIE M. FARMER.
Christmas Fruit Cookies. cupful lard, cupful butter, 1/4 cupful sugar, 2 beaten eggs, + cupful milk, 2 cupfuls flour, 1 teaspoonful soda, cupful currants, cupful raisins, 2 cupfuls uncooked rolled oats.
Cream the butter and lard, add the sugar, eggs, milk, flour, soda, currants, raisins, and rolled oats. Mix thoroughly, drop a teaspoonful at a time in unbuttered pans, and bake in a slow oven.
Two drop-cookie doughs of the same family: creamed fat and sugar, egg, chemical leavening, and a heavy load of dried fruit. Both are forgiving, but the oven directions and several of the quantities need translating.
- Oven temperaturesPeriod usage puts a "moderate oven" at roughly 350F and a "slow oven" at roughly 300 to 325F, though the book itself gives no figures. For the oatmeal-and-fruit dough keep to the low end and check at 15 to 20 minutes.
- Ambiguous quantitiesSeveral of the cup measures in the Christmas Fruit Cookies have lost their fractions and cannot be reconstructed with confidence. Judged against comparable oat drop cookies of the period, the fats together should be about a cup and the milk a small quantity, but treat the printed figures as incomplete rather than as written amounts.
- Soda dissolved in waterRecipes of this period often direct that soda be dissolved in a little water before it goes into the batter, which helps distribute it evenly. Modern baking soda can be sifted with the flour instead; if you follow the original, use no more than a tablespoon of water.
- Rolled oats"Uncooked rolled oats" here means old-fashioned rolled oats, not instant. Instant oats absorb liquid too fast and give a pasty crumb.
- LardLeaf lard or a good rendered lard gives the short, tender texture intended. Much supermarket shelf-stable lard is hydrogenated and behaves more like shortening; unsalted butter for the whole quantity works, with slightly more spread.
- Unbuttered pansThe oatmeal dough is greased enough by its own fat to release from bare tinware. On modern nonstick or heavy aluminium sheets, parchment is easier and prevents the fruit sticking where it touches the pan.
- Spacing and yieldAn inch between spoonfuls is tight for a soft dough; two inches is safer. No reliable yield can be given, since the first recipe's quantities are missing entirely and the second's are incomplete.
- Fruit and nutsToss currants and raisins with a spoonful of the measured flour before folding them in so they stay suspended rather than sinking to the base of each cookie.
Fannie Merritt Farmer, whose name is signed to the first of these, was principal of the Boston Cooking School and later opened her own school of cookery, and her 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cook Book is generally credited with helping fix the level measuring cup and spoon as the American standard. Household compendiums of this kind reprinted her recipes, which is why she turns up in the middle of a chapter of anonymous drop cookies. The second recipe belongs to the same moment: rolled oats had become a cheap packaged staple by the end of the century.