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Chocolate Powder (Tablespoons hot water teaspoon)
2 tablespoons hot water 1 teaspoon cinnamon Cream butter; add sugar, eggs, raisins, flour in which baking powder has been sifted, chocolate melted in water, salt and cinnamon. Drop from a teaspoon on to a buttered baking sheet, put a raisin in the center of each hermit, and bake in a moderate oven. See colored illustration, Plate XV, opposite. 5 egg whites
What survives here is a fragment: the method for chocolate hermits, with most of its ingredient list lost and a stray "5 egg whites" from the neighbouring recipe attached at the end. The instructions are usable, but the quantities are not on this page.
- The quantities are genuinely missingOnly the 2 tablespoons hot water and 1 teaspoon cinnamon survive. Butter, sugar, eggs, raisins, flour, baking powder, salt and the chocolate itself are all called for in the method with no amounts given, and there is no honest way to reconstruct them from this text. Use a modern chocolate hermit or chocolate drop-cookie formula and treat this page as a record of technique.
- The trailing "5 egg whites"This appears to be stray text from a neighbouring recipe on the original page. Nothing in the hermit method uses whites separately, so ignore it.
- "A moderate oven"Roughly 350-375F. Drop cookies of this size will want somewhere around 10 to 12 minutes; they should still look slightly soft at the centre when they come out.
- The chocolate"chocolate melted in water" in a book of this period means unsweetened baking chocolate, sold in cakes and squares. Melted in only 2 tablespoons of hot water it gives a thick paste; do not substitute cocoa powder measure for measure.
- What a hermit isA soft, spiced drop cookie with raisins, closer to a small cake than a crisp biscuit. The raisin pressed into the centre of each is decorative.
- Buttered baking sheetParchment is better here. Sugary raisin doughs stick and the edges of a buttered sheet scorch, particularly on a dark modern pan.
Hermits are a New England cookie, appearing in American cookbooks through the second half of the nineteenth century as a keeping cake -- molasses or brown sugar, spice and dried fruit, which stay soft in a tin for days. The name is usually traced, without documentation, to their dark and unglamorous look. What is distinctive here is the chocolate: a chocolate hermit takes a familiar regional cookie and turns it toward the chocolate shelf, with a colour plate opposite to make the case.