Home › Cookies-Doughnuts › Drop Sugar Cookies
Drop Sugar Cookies
½ C shortening 1 C sugar 2 eggs, well beaten Cinnamon & nutmeg ½ C milk Pinch salt Nellie McCready. 2 t baking powder 1/2 C raisins, cut up 1/2 C Wheatena (scant) Flour enough to drop by spoonfuls Mrs. Thos. Corlett. 2 C sugar 1 C butter or lard 1 C sour milk Nutmeg
A community-book cookie recorded as an ingredient list with no method and no oven, which was normal shorthand among cooks who already knew how a drop cookie goes together. The notes below fill in what the page assumes.
- WheatenaA toasted whole-wheat breakfast cereal, still sold in boxes and still coarse and granular in texture. The page gives no method, but in a drop cookie it would most likely go in dry, giving a nubbly bite; a scant half cup of another dry cereal grain of similar coarseness would behave much the same.
- ShorteningIn a book of this vintage "shortening" is likely to mean lard, or a lard-and-butter mixture, rather than hydrogenated vegetable shortening; the page's own "butter or lard" line points that way. Butter gives more flavour and a little more spread.
- Sour milk and baking powderSour milk -- One of the ingredient groups on the page calls for sour milk, which in period usage means naturally clabbered raw milk, not today's pasteurised milk gone off. Buttermilk is the usual modern substitute. Note that the baking powder is listed in a different group on the page, so the two do not necessarily belong to the same recipe.
- "Flour enough to drop by spoonfuls"The dough should hold a soft mound on the spoon and slump only slightly on the sheet. Add flour a quarter cup at a time and stop early; drop cookies stiffened past this point bake dry and cakey.
- OvenNo temperature is given, as is common in books of this kind. Drop cookies of this composition bake at 375F for 10 to 12 minutes, until the edges are set and lightly coloured.
- SpicesCinnamon and nutmeg are listed without amounts. A teaspoon of cinnamon and a quarter teaspoon of freshly grated nutmeg suits this quantity of dough.
- RaisinsRaisins of the period were often larger, drier and seeded, which is the likely reason for cutting them up. Modern seedless raisins can go in whole, though a brief soak in hot water keeps them from scorching on the sheet.
- YieldThe page is fragmentary, so this is only an estimate: a batch of this rough size would give something in the region of three to four dozen cookies.
Congregational cook books like this one were assembled by subscription: each contributor sent in a favourite receipt over her own name, and the compiler set them in whatever order they arrived. A page may carry two women's names, and the measurements are telegraphic "C" and "t" abbreviations with no directions at all. The cookies themselves belong to the American drop-cookie tradition, in which a spoon-dropped dough replaced rolled and cut cookies for everyday baking. The Wheatena is a small period marker: it is generally traced to a Brooklyn origin in the late 1870s, though it was not sold under stable national branding until later, and home cooks promptly began pushing such cereals into cookies, puddings and breads as cheap bulk and texture.