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Hermits
— Mrs. C. W. Taft
2 eggs well beaten, 1½ cups sugar, 1 cup sour cream or 1 cup sour milk and 1/2 cup shortening; 1 tsp. each of Slade's nutmeg, cinnamon, allspice, 2/3 tsp. Slade's cloves, salt, 1 tsp. soda in 1 tbsp. hot water, 1 cup chopped raisins. Flour enough to make quite stiff, then drop and bake in a quick oven. MRS. CLIFTON M. TRACY. h
A soft, spiced drop cookie leavened with soda and sour milk. The only real vagueness is the flour, which the original leaves to judgment.
- "Quick oven"Period sources put this somewhere around 400-425F, though the term was never standardized. Drop cookies of this size do better at 400F for 8-11 minutes; any hotter and the edges set before the raisin-heavy centers finish.
- Slade's spicesD. & L. Slade Co. of Boston was a widely advertised spice packer, and cookbooks of this type were often underwritten by such brands. Any nutmeg, cinnamon, allspice and cloves will do; grate the nutmeg fresh if you can.
- Sour milk or sour creamBoth here mean genuinely soured dairy, acidic enough to react with the soda. Buttermilk is the closest substitute for the sour milk; for the sour cream, use cultured sour cream, not sweet cream.
- The soda in hot waterDissolving the teaspoon of soda in a tablespoon of hot water disperses it evenly, which matters when there is no baking powder and no sifting step. Add it last and get the dough into the oven without a long wait.
- ShorteningAt this period the word means lard, butter, or a lard-and-cottonseed compound. Half a cup of softened butter works and tastes better; melted and cooled butter makes a flatter cookie.
- "Flour enough to make quite stiff"Genuinely ambiguous, but with this much liquid expect roughly 3 to 3 1/2 cups. Stop when the dough holds its shape on the spoon rather than running off it.
- SaltThe list reads as though salt shares the 2/3 tsp. measure with the cloves. Two-thirds of a teaspoon is a sensible amount for a batch this size.
- YieldAbout three and a half to four dozen cookies, dropped a couple of inches apart. They are soft when hot and firm as they cool, so judge doneness by set edges rather than crispness.
Hermits belong to the New England spiced-cookie family and appear in American church and community cookbooks from the later nineteenth century onward, usually as a drop cookie with molasses or brown sugar, warm spices, raisins and often nuts. The name's origin is not documented; it is often said to refer to their keeping quality, since a stiff spiced dough with dried fruit stays edible for days and travels well, which made hermits a standard for lunch pails, church suppers and shipping to relatives. This version is unusual in leaning on sour cream or sour milk with soda rather than molasses, a leavening habit generally associated with kitchens where soured dairy was on hand. The double attribution here, to Mrs. C. W. Taft and Mrs. Clifton M. Tracy, is a common artifact of community cookbooks, which were compiled from contributions submitted by members and set in type with little editing.