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Oatmeal Cookies (Cup butter cup sugar eggs cup)
1/2 cup butter 1 cup sugar 2 eggs 2/3 cup milk 2 cups oatmeal 2 cups flour 1/2 tsp. salt 1 tsp. soda 1 tsp. Slade's cinnamon 2 cups raisins Drop in teaspoonfuls into baking tins. Shape a little. This quantity makes 36 cakes.
— Elsie Tunison Snow
A plain drop cookie of the type that filled church-society cookbooks around 1900. The method is assumed rather than written down, and one or two details need translating.
- Method, since none is givenCream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, then add the milk alternately with the combined dry ingredients, and stir in the raisins last. The dough should be stiff enough to hold a rough mound on the sheet.
- Oatmeal means rolled oatsIn a book of this period "oatmeal" on a cookie list is rolled oats, not steel-cut or the fine ground oatmeal used for porridge in Scotland. Old-fashioned rolled oats give the right texture; quick oats will work but the cookie is softer and less chewy.
- Slade's cinnamonD. & L. Slade Co. of Boston sold ground spices and extracts, and their name turns up throughout regional charity cookbooks of the era. Any good ground cinnamon does the job; one teaspoon in this quantity of dough is mild by modern taste.
- The sodaA teaspoon of soda with sweet milk and no acid ingredient will leave a faint soapy or metallic edge. Sour milk was commonly on hand in period kitchens and the recipe may have assumed it, though the text says only milk; with fresh milk, use buttermilk instead, or substitute two teaspoons of baking powder for the soda.
- OvenNo temperature is given; most kitchen ranges of this period had no oven thermometer. Bake at 375F for 10 to 12 minutes, until the edges are set and lightly browned but the centres still look soft.
- RaisinsTwo cups is a heavy proportion by current standards and makes a fruit-dense cookie. Plumping them in hot water for ten minutes and draining well keeps them from scorching on the tray.
- Yield and spacingThe recipe says teaspoonfuls and claims 36 cakes, but the listed quantities amount to something like eight cups of dough including the raisins, which works out far larger than a teaspoonful per cookie; either the mounds were generous or the yield is approximate. Leave two inches between them; "shape a little" means press the mound down slightly.
- Baking tinsAn ungreased heavy sheet or a sheet lined with parchment is fine. The butter in the dough is sufficient to prevent sticking on most modern pans.
The Philathea classes were adult Bible-study groups for young women, the counterpart to the men's Baraca classes, and the movement that grew out of them in the 1890s spread through Protestant churches across North America. Cookbooks like this one were compiled and sold to fund class activities, which is why every recipe carries a contributor's name; brand names such as Slade's cinnamon appear in the ingredient lists, though the reason can only be guessed at — whether they filled advertising space or were simply what the neighbourhood pantry held. Oatmeal cookies themselves are a product of the same decades, following the commercial rolled oat that milling firms pushed hard into American kitchens from the 1880s on. Once the oat came boxed, cheap and pre-flaked, it moved into cakes, breads and above all drop cookies, where it stretched flour and sugar and kept well in a tin.