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Long-Keeping Fruit and Nut Cookies
One cup margarine, 1 1/2 cups brown sugar creamed together, add 1 cup chopped nut meats, 1 teaspoon salt, 3 well-beaten eggs, 1 teaspoon soda dissolved in 1 1/2 tablespoons hot water; 1/2 cup each currants and raisins or all raisins, chopped; 1 teaspoon mixed spice, grated rind of lemon or orange if handy, or little chopped candied peel; 3 1/2 cups sifted flour. Drop by spoonfuls on greased baking pans. Sprinkle tops with sugar if desired. Bake in moderate (400 degrees) oven.
A sturdy drop cookie built on the old fruitcake principle: enough sugar, fat and dried fruit that the finished cookies stay soft for weeks in a tin. The batter is stiff and the dough handles best cold.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe calls its oven "moderate" but gives 400F, which by modern reckoning is hot. For a drop cookie this size, 375F for 10-12 minutes gives an even bake; at a true 400F watch from 8 minutes, as the brown sugar and dried fruit darken quickly.
- Mixed spiceA British-style blend, usually cinnamon-heavy with nutmeg, allspice, clove and often coriander and ginger. Pumpkin pie spice is the closest supermarket substitute, or mix 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon with 1/4 teaspoon each nutmeg and allspice and a pinch of clove.
- Soda in hot waterDissolving the baking soda before it goes in distributes it evenly through a heavy batter that would otherwise leave bitter pockets. Add it after the eggs and before the flour, and get the dough onto pans without long delay.
- CurrantsZante currants are dried small grapes, not fresh red or black currants. They are sold with the raisins; if unavailable the recipe already sanctions using all raisins.
- MargarineModern stick margarine works as written. Tub spreads carry more water and will slacken the dough, so use sticks or substitute butter, which improves the flavour and firms the dough on chilling.
- Dough consistencyThree and a half cups of flour against one cup of fat gives a very stiff drop dough. Chill it 30 minutes if it fights the spoon, and space the mounds about two inches apart; they spread only a little.
- Yield and keepingExpect roughly four to five dozen cookies from the batch, depending on spoon size. Cooled completely and stored airtight, they should stay soft considerably longer than a plain butter cookie, which is the point of the recipe.
Cookies like this one sit on the border between a biscuit and a fruitcake, and that is what makes them keep: sugar and dried fruit hold moisture, and the high fat slows staling, so the crumb stays soft long after a plain butter cookie has gone to dust. Recipes of this shape appear under names like hermits and fruit drops in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American home cookery, with rock cakes as the British counterpart. The margarine is a marker of the period, as is the frugal permission to skip the citrus rind "if handy" or replace it with candied peel left over from Christmas baking. Placing them among Christmas dinners fits the older logic of holiday cooking, where anything that could be made weeks ahead and stored was made weeks ahead and stored.