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Hermits (Cup sugar cup butter cup milk)
1 cup sugar, 1/2 cup butter, 1/2 cup milk, 1 egg, 1/2 lb. chopped raisins, 1 level tsp. Slade's cream tartar , 1/2 tsp. soda. Flour to make stiff. Drop in small spoonfuls.
A plain drop cookie with no spice in it, which is unusual for a hermit — most versions of the period carry cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves. The only real puzzle is the flour, which is left entirely to the cook.
- "Flour to make stiff"Expect 2 1/2 to 3 cups of all-purpose flour. Add it a half cup at a time and stop when the dough holds a mound on the spoon rather than slumping; overshooting gives dry, cakey hermits.
- Slade's cream tartarD. & L. Slade Co. of Boston was a spice and cream of tartar packer, and the brand name simply means cream of tartar. Use 1 level teaspoon of it with the 1/2 teaspoon of soda; together they do roughly the work of about 2 teaspoons of modern baking powder, which may be substituted if you leave out both.
- Chopped raisinsHalf a pound is roughly 1 1/2 cups. Chopping helps here: whole raisins sit awkwardly in a stiff drop dough, and any left exposed on top can scorch. Give them a rough chop with a floured knife or a few pulses in a processor.
- OvenThe book gives none. Bake at 350F for 10 to 12 minutes, until the edges are set and the centers still look slightly soft; they firm as they cool.
- Mixing orderCream the butter and sugar, beat in the egg, then add the milk alternately with the flour, cream of tartar and soda sifted together. Once liquid meets the leavening pair, get the trays into the oven without delay.
- Spicing, if you want itMany hermit recipes of the period carry cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves, often with molasses in place of part of the sugar, though amounts vary widely from book to book. This version is plain and pale, so it will not taste like the dark hermit most people know.
- YieldAbout three dozen small cookies from small spoonfuls, set two inches apart.
Hermits are a New England drop cookie, appearing in print in American cookbooks from around the 1870s onward, by most accounts, and traditionally associated with Cape Cod and the coasting trade, where a hard, well-keeping spiced cookie is said to have traveled well in a tin. The name has never been explained with any certainty; it is variously said to come from the cookies keeping so well that they could be hidden away like a hermit's hoard, or from the dark, drab color of the usual molasses-and-clove version. Its place in a Philathea cook book is typical of the genre: these were fundraising collections gathered from the members of Philathea classes, the adult women's Bible classes of the Baraca movement, and the recipes come in as households actually wrote them down — brand names intact, oven heat and flour quantity left to the cook's judgment.