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Hermits (T baking powder C flour T milk)
2 1/2 T butter. 1 egg. 1/2 t cinnamon. 1/2 t cloves. Salt. 2 t baking powder 1 C flour 2 T milk ¼ C raisins 4 walnuts Mix as for cake. Drop on oiled sheet. Bake at 350° for about 20 minutes. (3 min. paper test.) Mrs. Kruckman. 1 C Crisco 1½ C sugar 3 eggs ½ t soda 2 t water
The text has come through scrambled: the fat, sugar and eggs are printed after the instructions, and several fractions have lost their slashes. Read it as one ingredient list before you start, and treat the flour quantity as the open question.
- Reassemble the ingredient listThe recipe is 1 C Crisco, 1½ C sugar, 3 eggs, baking powder, soda dissolved in water, milk, flour, raisins and walnuts. The second block at the bottom belongs at the top.
- Fractions lost in printing"14 C raisins" is most likely 1/4 cup (though 1 1/4 cups is a possible reading), "12 t soda" is 1/2 teaspoon, and "4 walnuts" has probably lost a fraction and a measure -- 1/4 cup chopped walnuts is a plausible reconstruction. Either way this is a modest hand with the fruit and nuts.
- The flour is the problemOne cup of flour cannot carry a cup of shortening, 1 1/2 cups sugar and three eggs; the batter would pour rather than drop. A creamed batter of this size would normally take considerably more flour -- something in the region of three cups. The original figure is unreliable and worth judging by feel: add flour until the dough holds a soft mound on the spoon.
- CriscoHydrogenated vegetable shortening, sold since 1911 and still available. Modern Crisco is reformulated to remove trans fat but behaves the same in creaming; unsalted butter substitutes cup for cup and gives more flavour and a little more spread.
- Soda and waterPeriod recipes often direct that the soda be dissolved in a spoonful of water before adding, the usual explanation being that undissolved soda leaves bitter yellow streaks in the crumb. It costs nothing to do.
- The paper test"3 min. paper test" refers to the older method of judging heat by how fast a sheet of white paper browns in the oven; the timings quoted in period sources vary, so no exact modern equivalent can be given. Since the temperature is already stated, use an oven thermometer.
- What is missingHermits are a spiced cookie, and no spice is listed here. A teaspoon of cinnamon with half a teaspoon each of nutmeg and cloves would suit a batch this size.
- Baking and yieldTwenty minutes at 350F is long for a dropped cookie; check at 12 to 14 minutes and pull them when the edges set but the centres still look soft. Assembled as above, expect roughly three to four dozen.
Hermits are a New England cookie, generally traced to New England in the nineteenth century, where the combination of molasses or brown sugar, dried fruit and warm spice made a cake that kept for weeks -- the sort of thing sent to sea, which is one traditional explanation for the name. By the time this book was compiled the hermit had spread west as a church-supper and lunch-pail standard, and versions like Mrs. Kruckman's had begun to shed the molasses in favour of white sugar and the newly ubiquitous Crisco. The ingredients here arrive out of order and stripped of their fractions, though how that happened is unclear: the loss of the slashes in some quantities while others survive intact suggests a transcription or scanning artefact rather than anything in the original.