Oat Cookies
1/2 cup sugar. 1/3 cup butter. 1 egg. 1/4 teaspoon salt. 1 cup rolled oats. 1/2 cup flour 1/2 cup chopped raisins 1/2 tablespoon cinnamon 1/2 teaspoon soda 1 tablespoon hot water Beat the butter and sugar to a cream; mix in the other ingredients, adding the soda last, dissolved in the hot water. Roll the dough into small balls like nuts and bake on buttered tins in a moderately hot oven.
The ingredient list as printed is incomplete — butter, sugar and the oats that give the cookie its name are all called for in the method but absent from the list. Treat the quantities below as reconstruction, not transcription.
- The missing amountsThe method requires butter and sugar creamed together, neither of which appears in the printed list; oats are implied only by the title. One workable reconstruction for the half cup of flour given is 1/2 cup butter, 1 cup brown sugar, 1 egg and 1 1/2 cups rolled oats — but the proportions, and the egg, are guesswork, not the book's.
- "Moderately hot oven"Modern equivalence tables generally put this around 375–400°F, between a moderate oven (about 350°F) and a hot or quick one (about 425°F). That suits a small cookie that must set before the sugar scorches.
- Soda and hot waterDissolving the soda in a little hot water before adding it appears frequently in recipes of this period, when soda could be coarse and lumpy, and it still helps distribute half a teaspoon evenly through a stiff dough. Add it last, as directed, and get the trays into the oven promptly.
- Half a tablespoon of cinnamonThat is 1 1/2 teaspoons for half a cup of flour — assertive by modern standards, though heavy spicing is not unusual in recipes of this date. Reduce to a teaspoon if the cinnamon is fresh and strong.
- Balls "like nuts""Like nuts" is usually read as walnut-sized, roughly a level tablespoon of dough. Allow a couple of inches between them in case they spread.
- Buttered tinsParchment on a flat sheet does the job better; sweet oat doughs stick and tear when lifted from bare metal.
- Timing and yieldTen to twelve minutes, until the edges are set and browned and the centres still look soft. Yield depends entirely on the reconstructed quantities.
- The raisinsChop them as directed. Whole raisins sit on the surface of a small cookie and burn before the dough is done.
Loose-leaf cookbooks like Mrs. Fryer's were sold as binders so that a cook could add, remove and reorder pages. This page has its ingredient list clipped short. Oat cookies belong to the wave of rolled-oat baking that followed the arrival of cheap steam-rolled oats in North American groceries in the late nineteenth century, when the cereal companies promoted oatmeal well beyond the breakfast bowl and cookbooks obliged with oat cakes, oat macaroons and oat drop cookies. The dissolved-soda step is a marker of the same period, carried over from lump saleratus, kept long after commercial baking soda had become fine and reliable.