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Oat Meal Drop Cookies
3/4 cup butter. 1 cup white sugar. 1/4 cup sweet milk. 2 cup Quaker oats. 1 1/4 cups flour. 2 eggs. 1 level teaspoon baking powder. 1 level teaspoon salt. 1 level teaspoon cinnamon. 1 level teaspoon nutmeg. 1/2 teaspoon cloves. 1 cup seeded raisins cut fine. 1/2 cup hickory nuts.
Drop in buttered baking pan in spoonfuls some distance apart. If dough spreads too much add more flour.
An ingredient list with almost no method, which was normal in 1920 — the reader was assumed to know how a drop cookie is assembled. The gaps worth filling are the mixing order, the oven, and the nuts.
- Mixing orderCream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, then the milk, then the dry ingredients sifted together, and fold in the oats, raisins and nuts last. Adding the oats early lets them absorb liquid and the dough stiffens unpredictably before it reaches the pan.
- No oven temperature is givenBake at 375F for 10 to 12 minutes, until the edges are set and browned and the centres still look slightly soft. These cookies carry a lot of butter and sugar and will go from golden to bitter quickly.
- Sweet milkPlain fresh whole milk. The term distinguished it from the sour milk or buttermilk that older recipes paired with saleratus; it is not sweetened.
- Quaker oatsRolled oats, used here as a brand name for the ordinary kind. Old-fashioned rolled oats give the texture intended; quick oats work but produce a softer, more cake-like cookie, and steel-cut oats will not soften adequately in a bake this short.
- SaltA level teaspoon is on the generous side if you are using salted butter; cut it to half a teaspoon in that case.
- Hickory nutsCommon in eastern American kitchens when nuts were gathered rather than bought, and rarely sold now. Pecans are the closest relative in flavour and the standard substitute; walnuts are fine.
- SpreadingThe instruction to add more flour is the practical control here, but chilling the dough for half an hour does the same job without making the cookies dry. Two inches between spoonfuls is enough.
- Pan and yieldButter the sheet as directed or use parchment. The batch makes roughly three dozen cookies of a rounded-tablespoon size.
The recipe belongs to the years around the First World War, when government food campaigns pushed oats, cornmeal and other grains as substitutes for scarce white wheat flour — and an oatmeal cookie that uses two cups of oats to a little over one of flour fits that argument neatly, whether or not it was written for it. Rolled oats had by then been a mass-market packaged good for a generation, sold in the cylindrical carton that made "Quaker oats" a common shorthand for the product itself, much as cooks of the period wrote "a Dover egg beater." The heavy hand with cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves plus a cup of raisins is characteristic of American spiced drop cookies of the era, close cousins to hermits and rocks; the hickory nuts are the local touch, a wild nut still gathered rather than purchased in much of the eastern United States.