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Hermits
One-third cupful of butter, 2/3 cupful of sugar, 1 egg, 2 tablespoonfuls of water, 1 teaspoonful of condensed milk, 1 3/4 cupfuls of flour, 2 teaspoonfuls of baking-powder, 1/3 cupful of raisins, stoned and cut in pieces; 1 teaspoonful of cinnamon, 1/4 teaspoonful each of clove, mace and nutmeg.
Cream the butter, add sugar gradually, then egg well beaten and milk. Mix and sift dry ingredients; add to first mixture; add raisins well floured. Roll thin, cut out and bake in moderate oven until brown.
A rolled, cut spice cookie of the plain New England sort — stiff enough to handle, sweet enough to keep. A few of the quantities in the printed text have lost their fractions, so read the amounts with care.
- Oven temperatureA "moderate oven" is generally taken as about 350–375°F. Thin rolled cookies brown fast; start checking at 8 minutes and expect 8–12 depending on thickness.
- The flour figureThe flour quantity is printed as "134 cupfuls," which is 1¾ cups. With ⅓ cup butter and ⅔ cup sugar that gives a firm, rollable dough; add flour by the tablespoon only if it still sticks.
- The smaller spicesThe clove, mace and nutmeg are given as a fraction that has not survived intact in print; "4 teaspoonful each" is most likely ¼ teaspoon each, which sits sensibly against the 1 teaspoon of cinnamon.
- Condensed milkIn cookbooks of this period "condensed milk" usually meant the sweetened canned product. At one teaspoon it is doing little as liquid; evaporated milk is a different product. Plain whole milk is an acceptable substitute at this quantity.
- Flouring the raisinsTossing the cut raisins in a little flour keeps them from sticking together and to the rolling pin. Take it from the measured 1¾ cups rather than adding extra.
- Rolling thinAbout ⅛ inch. Chilling the dough 30 minutes first makes it easier to roll and cut cleanly.
- YieldRoughly 3 dozen cookies from a 2-inch cutter, depending how thin they are rolled. They keep well in a tin.
Hermits are a New England cookie, appearing in American cookbooks from the later nineteenth century onward and standard in the Boston Cooking School tradition — the creaming method and the raisin-and-four-spice formula here follow that pattern closely. The name's origin is unsettled; it is often said to refer to the cookies' keeping quality, which made them provisions for long sea voyages and lunch pails, though no early source explains it outright. Their place in a low-cost recipe collection is easy to account for: one egg, a third of a cup of butter and a handful of raisins make a batch of substantial cookies, and the heavy spicing does the work that more sugar and more fruit would otherwise have to do. Modern hermits are more often dropped or baked in bars; the version given here is rolled and cut.