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Oatmeal Macaroons
2 eggs 1 cup sugar 1 tablespoon shortening 1 teaspoon salt 2 1/2 cups rolled oats 2 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 1 teaspoon vanilla extract Beat egg yolks and whites separately; cream sugar with melted shortening; add egg yolks, salt and rolled oats; add baking powder, egg whites and vanilla; mix thoroughly. Drop on greased tins about half teaspoon to each macaroon allowing space for spreading. Bake about ten minutes in moderate oven.
A flourless drop cookie held together by beaten egg white and oats. The whole thing depends on folding, not stirring, once the whites go in.
- The hinge: fold the whitesThe recipe says "mix thoroughly." Stir the yolk-sugar-oat mixture properly, then fold the beaten whites in with a spatula until just combined. Overworked whites give a flat, gluey macaroon instead of a crisp one.
- Oven temperatureA moderate oven is roughly 350-375F. Ten minutes is right for half-teaspoon drops; pull them when the edges are set and lightly browned but the centres still look soft.
- The oatsRolled oats here means old-fashioned rolled oats. Quick oats will work but give a denser, less craggy cookie; steel-cut or instant are unlikely to work.
- SaltOne teaspoon is a lot of salt for a batch this size. A scant 1/2 teaspoon of table salt reads closer to modern taste.
- ShorteningOne tablespoon is not a misprint. These are meringue-bound, not creamed cookies, so the fat is there for flavour and release only. Melted butter substitutes directly.
- Baking powderAny modern double-acting baking powder at the same measure. Royal was a cream-of-tartar powder that reacted largely on contact with moisture, so the original batter was meant to go straight onto the tins; there is no benefit to letting it stand.
- Pans"Greased tins" means a greased flat baking sheet. Parchment is better here because these are fragile and sticky with sugar. Let them firm on the sheet for a minute before lifting.
This comes from one of the promotional cookbooks Royal Baking Powder issued in large numbers in the early twentieth century, in which the recipes generally call for the company's own product by name. "Macaroon" originally meant a confection of ground almonds, sugar and egg white, and by the late nineteenth century American cookbooks had stretched the word to cover almost any small flourless drop bound with beaten egg white -- coconut macaroons and oat ones like this. The oats themselves are a marker of the period: commercial steam-rolled oats became a cheap pantry staple only after the milling consolidations of the 1880s and 1890s, and flourless recipes of this kind circulated widely during and after the First World War, when wheat conservation campaigns encouraged bakers to look elsewhere for bulk.