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Health Cookies
1 C brown sugar 1 C shortening 1 C sour milk ½ t salt 1 t baking soda 1 C whole wheat flour 1 C bran 2 well beaten eggs ¾ t nutmeg White flour to make a soft rolling dough Bake as preferred in either thin cookies or as tea cakes. Mrs. Kruckman.
A church-supper drop-or-roll cookie from the era when bran was newly fashionable as a health food. The typed fractions have lost their slashes in transcription, and the recipe gives no oven temperature at all.
- The fractionsThe printed page gives half a teaspoon of salt and three-quarters of a teaspoon of nutmeg, as our text now reads.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured raw milk, which no longer exists in the supermarket. Use buttermilk, or stir 1 tablespoon of lemon juice or white vinegar into a cup of whole milk and let it stand ten minutes. The acid is what activates the soda.
- ShorteningIn community books of this period the word could mean lard, butter, a mixture of the two, or the newer vegetable shortening; the recipe does not say which. A cup of softened butter works and tastes better, though the dough will spread slightly more.
- BranWheat bran, sold as unprocessed miller's bran, not bran breakfast cereal. It absorbs liquid slowly, so let the dough rest fifteen minutes before judging how much white flour it needs.
- "White flour to make a soft rolling dough"Expect roughly 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour. Stop while the dough is still tacky and just barely handleable; bran doughs turn dry and crumbly if floured to a stiff consistency.
- OvenNone is given. Bake at 375F, 8 to 10 minutes for thin rolled cookies, 12 to 15 for thicker tea cakes. They are done when the edges set; the centers should still look soft.
- YieldRoughly four dozen, depending on how thin you roll them. They keep well for several days in a tin and are firmer and less sweet than a modern cookie by design.
Bran and whole wheat cookies turn up all over American community cookbooks in the first decades of the twentieth century, riding a wave of enthusiasm for "health" baking that traces back to the nineteenth-century Graham movement and was given fresh life by the breakfast-cereal industry of Battle Creek. Bran, long treated as a byproduct fit for livestock, was rebranded as a corrective for the refined white flour that had become universal after roller milling. What is telling here is the framing: a cookie with a cup of brown sugar and a cup of shortening qualified as health food because it contained bran and whole wheat at all. Mrs. Kruckman's contribution is also a good example of how a community cookbook worked, as the compilers printed what members actually baked, abbreviations, missing oven temperature and all, on the assumption that any woman reading it already knew how hot to run her range.