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Oatmeal Cookies (Cup sugar eggs tsp Royal bak)
1 cup sugar 2 eggs 2 tsp. Royal bak. powder 2½ cups oatmeal 1 tbsp. butter 1 tsp. vanilla Cream butter and sugar, add yolks of eggs, then the oatmeal and baking powder, and last the vanilla and the whites of the eggs beaten stiff. Mix well and drop with a teaspoon on a baking sheet and bake in a moderate
— Mrs. James E. Choate
oven.
A flourless drop cookie that depends entirely on rolled oats for structure, which makes the handling of the batter the whole game.
- No flour is a typo, not an omissionNo flour — The 2½ cups of oatmeal are the only dry bulk in the recipe as printed; whether flour was dropped in typesetting or the recipe is genuinely flourless cannot be established. As written, the result is a chewy, fragile, macaroon-like cookie rather than anything resembling a modern oatmeal cookie, and it will spread and crumble if lifted from the sheet while hot.
- What "oatmeal" meantIn an American community cookbook of this period, oatmeal almost always means rolled oats — the flaked, steamed product sold by Quaker and its competitors — not Scottish pinhead or steel-cut oats, which will not soften in this short a bake.
- Moderate ovenConventionally about 350–375°F. Small teaspoon-sized drops need roughly 10 to 12 minutes, until the edges are set and lightly coloured; the centres firm as they cool.
- Royal baking powderA brand name typical of donated recipes. Royal was a cream-of-tartar powder that acted mainly on contact with moisture; modern double-acting powders hold more of their gas back for the oven, and some cooks may prefer to reduce the quantity slightly. Two teaspoons of an aluminium-based modern powder in a batter this small can leave a metallic edge.
- One tablespoon of butterThat is all the fat the printed recipe gives, and there is no way to tell from the page whether it is as intended. Creaming a single tablespoon with a full cup of sugar will not aerate; work it to a damp sand and rely on the beaten whites for lightness.
- Fold, do not stir, the whitesWith so little fat, the beaten whites carry much of the lightness alongside the baking powder. Once they go in, fold just until no streaks show; beating them in will slacken the batter so that it runs on the sheet.
- Prepare the sheetWith this much sugar and this little fat the cookies weld themselves to a bare modern aluminium sheet; use parchment.
- YieldDepends on the size of the drops; teaspoon-sized mounds spaced two inches apart will give several dozen small cookies.
Philathea classes were Bible study groups for young women organised within Baptist and other Protestant Sunday schools — the companion movement to the men's Baraca classes, dating from the 1890s — and such groups often raised money by collecting members' recipes and selling the result locally, which is why each entry carries a contributor's name rather than a house style. The oatmeal cookie itself is a product of industrial milling: rolled oats became a cheap, shelf-stable pantry staple in North America in the late nineteenth century, and cereal companies pushed them hard beyond the breakfast bowl, printing baking recipes on packaging. The named brand in the ingredient list — Royal baking powder — reflects the same commercial pressure from the other direction; brand loyalty to a particular chemical leavener seems to have been strong enough in this period that a cook might specify it as though it were a distinct ingredient. Mrs. Choate's version, with its single tablespoon of butter and no flour at all, reads as a thrift recipe: sweet, filling and made almost entirely from the cheapest thing in the cupboard.