Home › Doughnuts and Cookies › Martha's Drop Cookies
Martha's Drop Cookies
1 tsp. salt 1 cup butter and lard mixed 1 cup white sugar 1 cup brown sugar 2 eggs 1/2 cup sour milk 1 tsp. soda 1 tsp. Slade's cloves 1 tsp. Slade's cinnamon 4 cups flour 1 cup raisins, 1 cup walnut meats (put each through grinder.) Dates can be used instead of raisins if desired.
Drop or spread on a well greased biscuit tin, and bake. Cut in squares. This recipe makes about 70 cookies.
— Mrs. L. L. Hopkins
A spice bar cookie disguised as a drop cookie: flatten the dough on a sheet and cut it into squares. The original assumes you know your own stove, so the key missing numbers are the oven temperature and the bake time.
- Oven and timingNo temperature is given, which was normal for the period. Spread as a sheet about 1/2 inch thick, 350F for roughly 20-25 minutes is a reasonable modern treatment; dropped as individual cookies, 10-12 minutes. Cut the squares while the sheet is still warm or it will shatter.
- Butter and lard mixedOne cup total, so 8 oz of fat. The recipe does not say in what proportion; equal parts is a reasonable reading. The lard gives tenderness and a shorter crumb; all butter works and tastes better to modern palates, all shortening gives the softest result.
- Sour milk and sodaSour milk here means milk soured naturally, clabbered and mildly acidic. Buttermilk is the direct substitute; failing that, half a cup of milk with about 1 1/2 teaspoons of lemon juice or vinegar, left ten minutes. The acid is what reacts with the teaspoon of soda; with sweet milk the cookies are likely to be flatter and may taste faintly soapy.
- Slade's cloves and cinnamonD. & L. Slade Co. of Boston was a spice and extract house whose products were widely advertised in New England church cookbooks; the brand name is simply what the contributor had on her shelf. Any ground cinnamon and cloves will do, though a teaspoon of cloves is assertive by current standards.
- Put each through grinderThe raisins and walnuts go through a food grinder, which makes a coarse paste rather than chopped pieces and distributes the fruit through the whole dough. A few pulses in a food processor gets you there; do not reduce the walnuts to butter.
- Biscuit tinA rimmed baking sheet. Well greased means it, since there is no parchment in this kitchen and the sugar-heavy dough sticks.
- FlourFour cups of unsifted flour by modern scoop is around 500 g, which gives a stiff dough you spread with a spatula or damp hands rather than pour. If it feels unworkable, the sour milk was probably thicker than yours.
- YieldAbout 70 small squares, which is a church-supper quantity.
Philathea cook books were produced by Philathea classes — the young women's wing of the Baraca-Philathea movement, a Sunday-school organisation that spread through American and Canadian Protestant churches in the first decades of the twentieth century — and were sold to raise money for class work. Their contents are typical of such fundraising books: signed recipes from members, printed as they were handed in, brand names and all. The reference to Slade's cloves and cinnamon loosely places this one, since D. & L. Slade of Boston sold its spices heavily to New England households. The recipe itself belongs to the large family of sour-milk spice cookies that filled the doughnut-and-cookie chapter of many community collections of the era: cheap fat, cheap sugar, soda rather than baking powder, and a yield large enough to feed a hall.