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English Cookies
2 whole eggs or 4 yolks beaten very light. 1 cup sugar. 3/4 cup butter. 2 cups flour with 2 teaspoons baking powder. 3/4 cup sherry wine with 2 teaspoons cinnamon and 1/2 teaspoon cloves dissolved in wine.
To this batter add one cup chopped raisins, three-quarters cup chopped pecans. Mix all well and bake in gem rings.
A spiced, sherry-scented batter baked in gem pans rather than dropped on a sheet, despite the name. The instructions assume a cook who already knows the standard creaming method, so a little order needs restoring.
- Gem ringsCast-iron gem pans are shallow, rounded cups, broadly comparable to a modern muffin tin though often smaller. A well-greased muffin pan is the nearest substitute; the recipe gives no yield.
- Method the recipe omitsCream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, then add the flour and baking powder alternately with the spiced sherry, and fold in the fruit and nuts last. Adding all the liquid at once to creamed butter will curdle the mixture.
- OvenNothing is given. A moderate oven, 350-375F, for 20-25 minutes suits a batter of this richness; test with a skewer.
- The sherryThree-quarters of a cup is a large proportion of liquid and carries the spice, so the wine is doing the work of both flavouring and moistening. A medium or cream sherry probably suits it better than a bone-dry fino. Some of the alcohol bakes off, but a fair amount remains.
- Spices in the wineDissolving the cinnamon and cloves in the sherry before mixing is worth doing as written -- it disperses the ground spice evenly instead of leaving specks through the crumb. Half a teaspoon of cloves is assertive; scale back if that is not to taste.
- EggsTwo whole eggs or four yolks are offered as equals. The yolk version bakes noticeably richer and denser, and beating them "very light" means until pale and thick, which takes several minutes with a mixer.
- Flouring the fruitToss the chopped raisins and pecans in a spoonful of the measured flour before folding them in, or they will sink to the bottoms of the cups.
"Cookie" here is used in its older, looser American sense -- from the Dutch koekje, a little cake -- rather than the flat baked biscuit the word now describes, and the direction to bake in gem rings puts these squarely among the small tea cakes of the period. Gem pans, heavy cast-iron trays of shallow cups, were standard equipment in American kitchens from the later nineteenth century. The combination of sherry, cinnamon, cloves, raisins and nuts is often connected with the English rich-fruit-cake tradition the title gestures at, scaled down to something a household could turn out in an afternoon. Mrs. Wilson wrote for Philadelphia newspaper readers around 1920, and a cup of sherry in the pantry was about to become harder to come by.