Home › Extra-Special Company Cakes and Cookies › Oatmeal Sticks
Oatmeal Sticks
2 cups flour 2 cups quick oats 1 tablespoon sugar 4 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon salt 4 tablespoons shortening 1 egg 1 1/4 cups milk Pass the quick oats through meat chopper. Add dry ingredients and mix well. Cut in shortening as for biscuit, mix egg with milk and add to dry ingredients. Turn out on floured board and pat about 1/4 inch thick. Cut into pencil strips and roll between the hands. Place on greased cookie sheet, brush with milk and bake 40 minutes in slow oven (350 degrees F.).
A biscuit dough stiffened with ground oats and baked long enough to dry into crisp sticks rather than puff into rolls. The long bake is deliberate, not a misprint.
- Grinding the oatsThe meat chopper is doing the work of a food processor: pulse the quick oats briefly, until they resemble coarse flour with some flake still visible. The grinding is presumably what lets the dough roll into smooth strips.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe calls the oven "slow" but gives 350F, which is a true moderate oven. Use 350F as written; a genuinely slow oven of 300F would need considerably longer and the sticks would dry out before they took any color.
- ShorteningThe vegetable shortening of the period was hydrogenated and may have been firmer than much of what is sold now. Chilled butter or lard cut in cold behaves much the same way; the aim is pea-sized pieces, as for biscuits.
- Quick oatsQuick oats are rolled thinner and cut finer than old-fashioned oats and absorb liquid faster. Old-fashioned oats will work after grinding, but let the dough rest 10 minutes before rolling so the oats hydrate.
- ShapingPat to 1/4 inch and cut strips roughly 1/2 inch wide, then roll each between the palms into a pencil; the recipe specifies neither width nor length. Even thickness matters more than length.
- The long bakeForty minutes at 350F is what turns these from soft biscuit fingers into dry, crisp sticks that keep. Pull them when they are uniformly pale gold and snap cleanly; if they still bend, give them another five minutes.
- Yield and keepingThe recipe gives no yield, and it depends entirely on how long the sticks are rolled. Cool completely and store airtight; a few minutes in a low oven revives any that soften.
- ServingThese are barely sweet, one tablespoon of sugar to some four cups of dry ingredients, and suit soup, salad or cheese.