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Hermits
⅓ cup raisins, stoned and cut in small pieces 1/3 cup butter 2/3 cup sugar 1 egg ½ teaspoon cinnamon 2 tablespoons milk ¼ teaspoon clove 1¾ cups flour 1/4 teaspoon mace 2 teaspoons baking powder 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg Cream the butter, add sugar gradually, then raisins, egg well beaten, and milk. add to first mixture.
Vanilla Wafers.
Mix and sift dry ingredients and Roll mixture a little thicker than for 1/2 cup butter 1/3 cup sugar 1 egg well beaten
A spiced raisin drop-and-roll cookie from Farmer's cookie chapter. The ingredient list survives well enough to work from, though the method breaks off mid-sentence.
- The flour quantityThe printed "134 cups flour" is 1 3/4 cups, and "14 teaspoon clove" is 1/4 teaspoon; both are plainly slips where the fraction bar has dropped out.
- OvenNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, in the region of 375F for 8 to 10 minutes, suits a cookie of this thickness: bake until the edges are set and the centres still look slightly soft.
- Rolling thicknessThe sentence is cut off, but the comparison that survives is to Vanilla Wafers: the mixture is rolled "a little thicker" than those. The extra thickness is what keeps them from baking crisp.
- Order of workCream butter, add sugar gradually, then the raisins, the beaten egg, and the milk. Sift the flour with the baking powder and all four spices and add that to the creamed mixture last.
- "Stoned" raisinsRaisins of the period were commonly sold with their seeds and had to be stoned and chopped. Modern seedless raisins need only chopping, or use currants and skip that step.
- MaceMace is the outer covering of the nutmeg seed, milder and more floral. It is still sold ground, but if you have none, a little extra nutmeg is the nearest substitute.
- Dough handlingThe dough is soft and much easier to roll after 30 minutes in the refrigerator. Flour the board lightly; too much worked in makes the cookies dry.
- YieldAbout two dozen cookies at two inches across, depending on how thick you roll them.
Hermits are a New England cookie, appearing in print in the region in the nineteenth century and firmly established by the time Fannie Farmer's book went through its many editions. The name has never been convincingly explained; it is often said to refer to the cookie's plain brown appearance, and the claim that they were baked to keep well on long sea voyages is traditional rather than documented, though the keeping quality is real enough: slow staling. Farmer places them among the rolled cookies rather than the drop cookies; the softer spoon-dropped hermit bar familiar today is a later development.