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Cookies, Cakes, and Doughnuts
Maple Hermits. cupful maple sugar, cupful butter, 2½ cupfuls flour, 1 egg, 1 tablespoonful milk, teaspoonful cloves, 1 teaspoonful cinnamon, teaspoonful soda, cupful currants.
Beat the butter to a cream, and gradually beat in the sugar and spices.
Dissolve the soda in the milk, and beat this into the sugar and butter.
Add the egg well beaten, finally the flour and currants. Roll ou an inch thick, and cut in squares. Bake in a quick oven twelve minutes.
Sugar Cookies. 2 cupfuls sugar, 1 cupful butter, 3 eggs, 3 cupfuls flour, 1 teaspoonful Calumet baking powder, 1 teaspoonful nutmeg, teaspoonful cloves.
Cream butter and sugar, beat in the whipped eggs and spices, add the flour gradually, working it in until the dough is stiff enough to roll. Sprinkle flour over a pastry board. Make a ball of the dough, and lay it on the board. Rub the rolling-pin with flour and roll out the dough into a sheet quarter of an inch thick. Cut in round cakes, sift granulated sugar over each, and bake quickly.
Ginger Snaps. 2 cupfuls molasses, 1 cupful sugar, 1 cupful butter, 5 cupfuls flour, 1 teaspoonful ground ginger, 1 teaspoonful allspice, Stir molasses, sugar, and butter together in a bowl set in hot water till very light. Mix in spices and flour, and roll in a thin sheet. Cut into small cakes, and bake quickly.
Chocolate Dominoes. cupful pecan meat, cupful English-walnut meat, cupful figs, cupful dates, Grated rind 1 orange, 1 tablespoonful orange juice, 1 square Runkel's Chocolate.
Mix the nuts, dates, and figs, and put them through a food chopper.
Wet with the orange juice, mix in the grated rind, and roll in a ball. Lay it on the baking board, which has been covered with sifted confectioner's sugar, and roll half an thick. Cut into shapes the size of a domino, and spread with melted chocolate. On top lay little rounds cut from blanched almonds to imitate dominoes.
Four cookie recipes from a period when fractions were set in small type and often lost in reprinting — several quantities here have clearly dropped their halves and quarters. Read the notes on missing fractions before you start.
- Missing fractionsLines like "cupful maple sugar" and "teaspoonful cloves" originally carried a fraction that has not survived in this text. The amounts cannot be recovered from the page; as a working reconstruction for the Maple Hermits, ½ cup butter to 1 cup sugar with 2½ cups flour is a proportion that behaves, and ½ teaspoonful of the spices and ½ cupful of currants are plausible. The Chocolate Dominoes quantities are similarly unrecoverable — treat them as equal parts by volume, roughly ½ cup each of pecans, walnuts, figs and dates.
- Quick oven"Quick" means 425–450F. That is right for thin ginger snaps and sugar cookies, which will be done in 6–8 minutes and burn a minute later. For the inch-thick hermits, twelve minutes at 425F is optimistic; 375F for 15–18 minutes gives a cooked centre without a scorched base.
- Maple sugarThis means hard cake maple sugar, grated or broken down before creaming — not maple syrup, which would wreck the dough's liquid balance. Granulated maple sugar sold today creams into butter perfectly well.
- Soda without acidThe hermits use soda dissolved in milk with no strong acid in the mix. Modern milk is not sour milk, so lift will be slight and the crumb dense and cakey, which is what a hermit is meant to be. Note that the recipe calls for only a tablespoonful of milk, so substituting buttermilk adds very little acid and will change the result hardly at all.
- Rolled an inch thickThe hermits really are rolled thick and cut in squares — closer to a bar cookie than a wafer. Leave them a good inch apart; they spread little but they do puff.
- Brand namesCalumet was a phosphate-type baking powder, later sold as double-acting; any modern double-acting powder is a workable swap. Runkel's chocolate squares of this kind were baking chocolate, so one square is best read as 1 oz unsweetened — sweetened couverture will make the dominoes cloying against the figs and dates.
- Chocolate Dominoes are not bakedThere is no oven step. This is a fruit-and-nut confection, rolled and coated; the almond rounds are pressed on while the chocolate is still soft. Chill the slab firm before cutting or the domino edges will not hold.
- YieldNone is given. Expect about two dozen thick hermit squares, four to five dozen sugar cookies at ¼ inch, five to six dozen ginger snaps, and thirty-odd dominoes from a ½-inch slab.
Hermits are a New England cookie, generally placed in the later nineteenth century in the printed record — a spiced, fruited, soft-keeping drop or bar whose name is usually said to come from its brown, plain, unadorned look, though no origin is documented. Substituting maple sugar for brown is often said to be a northern New England and Quebec habit, where maple was the cheap sweetener and cane the imported one. The brand names woven into the ingredient lists — Calumet baking powder, Runkel's chocolate — date this collection firmly to the early twentieth century, when household books took advertising money or simply assumed readers bought by brand; Calumet, founded in Chicago in the 1880s, appears in a recipe list as a small marker of how quickly branded chemical leavening displaced saleratus and sour milk in the American kitchen.