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Boston Cookies
1 cup butter. 1 1/2 cups sugar. 3 eggs. 1 teaspoon soda. 1½ tablespoons hot water 3¼ cups flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon cinnamon 1 cup chopped nut meat, hickory or English walnut 1/2 cup currants ½ cup raisins, seeded and chopped Cream the butter, add sugar gradually, and eggs well beaten. Add soda dissolved in hot water, and one-half the flour mixed and sifted with salt and cinnamon; then add nut meat, fruit, and remaining flour. Drop by spoonfuls one inch apart on a buttered sheet, and bake in a moderate oven.
A plain drop cookie of the creaming type, stiff with flour and loaded with nuts and dried fruit. A few of the book's conventions need translating.
- "Moderate oven"Roughly 350 to 375F. For drop cookies of this size, 10 to 12 minutes is enough; they should be set and lightly coloured at the edges but still soft in the centre, since they firm up considerably as they cool.
- The flour quantityRead the flour as 3¼ cups. That is a stiff dough by design: it must hold its shape on the sheet rather than spread into a wafer.
- Soda in hot waterDissolving the baking soda in 1½ tablespoons of hot water before adding it distributes it evenly through a dough too thick to disperse dry powder reliably. Add it to the creamed mixture and get the cookies into the oven promptly, as the leavening begins working at once.
- Hickory nutsHickory nuts were a familiar gathered nut in parts of the northeast and are now sold rarely and expensively. English walnuts, the book's alternative, are the practical choice; pecans behave much the same way.
- Currants and raisinsThese are dried Zante currants, not fresh redcurrants. If they are stiff, cover them with hot water for five minutes and drain and dry them well, or they will pull moisture out of the dough.
- Buttered sheetA greased sheet was standard before parchment. Parchment or a silicone mat gives more even bottoms and prevents the fruit at the base of each cookie from scorching.
- One inch apartThat spacing suits this dough only because it barely spreads. If your dough seems slack, chill it for half an hour and allow closer to two inches.
- YieldExpect roughly four to five dozen cookies from the full quantity, depending on spoon size. They keep well for several days in a tin, and the flavour improves after the first day.
"Boston cookies" is a name that appears in New England cookbooks around the turn of the twentieth century for a fruit-and-nut drop cookie of exactly this kind. The technique here — cream the butter, work in sugar gradually, add beaten eggs, then alternate flour with the additions — is the standard creaming method taught at the cooking school. The mix of currants, seeded raisins and nuts reflects a pantry where dried fruit was a year-round staple and nuts were often shelled at home; seeding raisins by hand was ordinary kitchen labour until seedless varieties became widely available in the early decades of the century.