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Hermits (C butter or Snowdrift C sweet)
1 C butter or Snowdrift 1/2 C sweet milk 2 C sugar 1 t soda 1 C raisins, chopped fine 1 t cinnamon 1 C nutmeats Pinch salt 2 eggs 4 C flour Mrs. F. B. Wilson.
Mix soft and drop from teaspoon onto greased tins.
Note:-Mrs. J. B. Peaco uses 3 C flour. 1½ C light brown sugar ¾ C shortening 3 well beaten eggs 1 t cinnamon 1/4 t salt
A drop cookie written in the shorthand of a church-supper book: ingredients listed, method assumed. Two versions are given, Mrs. Wilson's and Mrs. Peaco's variant, and neither mentions an oven.
- Oven and timeNo temperature or time is given; the book assumes the cook knows. Drop cookies of this size are usually baked in a moderate oven, around 350-375F for roughly 10-12 minutes, until the edges set while the centers still look soft. They firm as they cool.
- C, t, and the missing tablespoonC is a cup, t a teaspoon. The book uses no abbreviation for tablespoon here, so every small measure in this recipe is a teaspoon.
- "34 C shortening"This is a typesetting casualty in the Peaco variant; the fraction bar was lost. Read it as 3/4 cup, which is in proportion to her 3 cups flour and 1 1/2 cups brown sugar.
- SnowdriftA canned vegetable (cottonseed oil) shortening of the early twentieth century, sold alongside and in competition with Crisco. Modern vegetable shortening substitutes cup for cup, though butter gives better flavor and tends to spread a little more.
- Sweet milkFresh whole milk, specified to distinguish it from the soured or buttermilk that many recipes of the period called for. The distinction mattered because it determined whether soda alone would work.
- The soda questionOne teaspoon of soda with sweet milk and white sugar has little acid to react with, so Mrs. Wilson's version rises modestly and browns well. Brown sugar is mildly acidic, so Mrs. Peaco's substitution would give the soda a little more to work on -- though her note lists only some of the ingredients, not a full alternative recipe.
- NutmeatsSimply shelled nuts; walnuts are the usual choice, with hickory nuts common where they were available. Chop them to about raisin size so the dough drops cleanly from the spoon.
- Consistency and yield"Mix soft" means a dough that mounds on the spoon rather than pours. Four cups of flour against one cup of butter gives a stiff batter; add milk by the spoonful if it will not drop. Expect about five dozen cookies from the full recipe.
Hermits are a New England cookie, generally traced to the mid-nineteenth century, built on spice, brown sugar, raisins and nuts. The name is usually explained by their keeping quality, since they improve after a few days in a tin, though that explanation is traditional rather than documented. By the time this congregation collected its recipes, hermits had spread well beyond New England and become standard church-supper and lunch-pail fare. What makes this entry worth reading is the printed disagreement: the compilers set down Mrs. Wilson's proportions and then noted, without adjudicating, that Mrs. Peaco does it differently. Community cookbooks routinely preserve that kind of unresolved argument, which is exactly what a commercial cookbook of the era would have edited away.