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Chocolate Cookies
3 squares chocolate, melted 3 C flour 2 eggs, well beaten 1 t vanilla Mix sugar, eggs, shortening. Add the melted chocolate, then the milk with soda dissolved, and 1 t vanilla; last the flour. Drop on greased pan and bake slowly.
Fannie Grinnell.
Phone-Libertyville 500 Robert Sitz General Contractor Plans and Estimates Furnished, on application Office and Residence Hurlburt Ct. 324 Hurlburt Court Libertyville, Ills. "Say it with flowers On Your Birthday Remember Your Mother!
A Flower token to your Mother on YOUR birthday brings you right to her. It's the nicest compliment you can pay, "the best pal you ever had," and is next best to flowers delivered by you in person.
If Mother is out of town, we deliver by wire in any part of the United States on short notice.
Use your telephone when ordering.
Joseph Kohout Co. Inc.
This is a drop cookie recorded in the shorthand of a cook who already knew it by heart, and the printed ingredient list has lost several lines. Read the points below before you shop.
- The list is incompleteThe method calls for sugar, shortening, milk and soda, but no quantities for any of them survive in the printed text. Only the chocolate, flour, eggs and vanilla are given, so this cannot be followed as written without borrowing proportions from a comparable drop cookie.
- A reasonable frame, if you rebuild itFor 3 cups of flour and 2 eggs, period chocolate drop cookies typically ran to about 1 1/2 cups sugar, 1/2 to 3/4 cup shortening, 1 cup milk and 1 teaspoon soda. That is inference from similar recipes of the era, not a recovered measurement.
- Squares of chocolateA square means one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, so three squares is 3 oz. It is not sweetened, which is why the sugar quantity matters so much here.
- ShorteningIn a book of this vintage this means lard or butter as often as it means hydrogenated vegetable shortening. Butter gives a better flavour with unsweetened chocolate.
- Soda dissolved in the milkThe soda is the only leavening, and with sweet milk it has little acid to work against beyond the chocolate itself. Sour milk or buttermilk was the common partner for soda in this period and will give a better rise.
- "Bake slowly"For drop cookies this means a slow to moderate oven, roughly 300-325F. Chocolate scorches and turns bitter at higher heat, and a soft batter cookie needs time to set rather than colour.
- Timing and yieldNo time is given. Expect roughly 10-15 minutes in a slow to moderate oven, until the tops spring back; the batter is soft and the cookies will be cakey rather than crisp. Three cups of flour should give something in the region of four dozen, though with the fat and liquid missing the yield is a guess.
Community cookbooks like this one were assembled by local women's groups to raise money, and they were paid for twice over: subscribers bought the book, and local merchants bought the advertising space that here runs straight into the middle of Fannie Grinnell's cookies. The contractor and the florist on this page are as much a part of the document as the recipe, and they tell you plainly that this was a small Illinois town where the printer set copy tight. The recipes themselves were submitted by hand, often abbreviated to nothing, which is how a list loses its sugar and shortening between the kitchen table and the type case. Chocolate drop cookies of this kind became common in American home baking once unsweetened baking chocolate was cheap and reliably available in wrapped one-ounce squares, and the "Say it with flowers" slogan alongside is generally traced to the American florists' trade of the late 1910s.