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Chocolate Fruit Cookies
1/4 cup butter ½ cup sugar 2 tablespoons grated chocolate 1 tablespoon sugar 1 tablespoon boiling water 1 egg 1/2 cup nut meats, finely chopped ½ cup seeded raisins, finely chopped 1 cup flour 4 1 teaspoon baking powder Cream the butter, and add sugar, gradually. Melt chocolate, add remaining sugar and water, and cook one minute. Combine mixtures, and add remaining ingredients. Chill, shape, and bake same as Chocolate Cookies.
This is a drop-and-chill icebox-style dough from Fannie Farmer's cookie chapter, and the text as printed has suffered in transcription. Read the quantities with care before you start.
- Stray digitThe sugar and raisin quantities were checked against the printed page and read as our text now gives them: half a cup each. The stray "4" between the flour and the baking powder is a page artifact and should be ignored.
- The trailing line"3 eggs, 1/4 cup butter, 1/2 cup sugar" at the end belongs to the neighboring recipe on the original page. Ignore it; this cookie takes one egg.
- Grated chocolateThis means unsweetened baking chocolate grated on a box grater, not cocoa powder and not chips. Two tablespoons grated is roughly half an ounce, so the chocolate here is a flavor note rather than the body of the cookie.
- The chocolate pasteMelting the chocolate with a tablespoon of sugar and a tablespoon of boiling water and cooking it a minute makes a thick glossy paste. Do this over low heat or a water bath and stir constantly; a scant tablespoon of liquid scorches quickly, and burnt chocolate cannot be rescued.
- "Same as Chocolate Cookies"The cross-referenced method is chill the dough until firm, roll or shape thin, and bake in a moderate oven. The original gives no temperature or timing; a modern equivalent is about 350F for 8 to 10 minutes. Watch the edges rather than the clock; the raisins and nuts brown before the dough looks done.
- Chopping the fruitFinely chopped is not optional here. Whole or halved raisins tear a thin rolled cookie and stick to the rolling pin. Dust the chopped raisins with a spoonful of the measured flour to keep them from clumping.
- Seeded raisinsMuscat-type raisins of this period contained seeds, and 'seeded' means those seeds had been removed, whether by hand at home or by the seeding machinery then coming into commercial use. Modern seedless raisins go straight in.
- YieldThe original gives none. Expect about two dozen small cookies from this quantity of dough.
Fannie Farmer's cookie chapter is built in families: a base recipe is given in full, then a run of variations that say only "shape and bake same as" the parent. This is one of those variations, and it shows how chocolate was still being handled at the end of the nineteenth century as a hard cake to be grated and cooked into a paste with sugar and water, rather than a smooth bar to be melted alone. Dutch-process cocoa and reliably tempered eating chocolate were available in American cities by the 1890s, yet the recipe still assumes a block of unsweetened chocolate, grated and worked up in the kitchen. The raisin-and-nut combination is characteristic of the period's cookies, which leaned on dried fruit for sweetness and moisture.