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Oatmeal Cookies
¼ cup fine oatmeal 2 cups flour 2 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon salt Beat egg until light, add sugar, cream, and milk; then add oatmeal, flour, baking powder, and salt, mixed and sifted. Toss on a floured board, roll, cut in shape, and bake in a moderate oven.
The ingredient list here has been scrambled in printing — the egg and sugar ended up at the bottom, and the cream and milk called for in the method never got listed at all. Read it as a rolled cookie dough and expect to judge the liquid by feel.
- The missing liquidsThe method calls for cream and milk but no quantities survive in this printing. Add enough to bring the dough together into a stiff, rollable mass and no more.
- Fine oatmealThis means finely ground oats — closer to oat flour or the fine grade of Scotch/Irish oatmeal than to modern rolled oats. Rolled oats will work but give a coarser, chewier cookie; pulsing them briefly in a food processor comes nearer the original texture.
- A moderate ovenConventionally read today as around 350F; the book itself gives no temperature. These are thin rolled cookies, so 8 to 12 minutes is usually enough -- pull them when the edges color and the centers still look pale.
- Sugar1½ cups is a lot against 2 cups of flour, and the dough will be sweet and prone to spreading and browning at the edges. Chilling the dough before rolling helps it hold a cut shape.
- Rolling and cuttingRoll about ⅛ to ¼ inch thick on a well-floured board. Oatmeal doughs tear more readily than plain flour doughs; work in batches and keep the reserve cold.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons to 2 cups flour is a common proportion and still fine. Many powders of the period were single-acting, so modern double-acting powder may give a little more lift and the cookies may puff slightly more.
- YieldRoughly three to four dozen 2-inch cookies, depending on thickness. They keep well in a tin and firm up as they cool.
Oatmeal moved from the porridge bowl into American baking during the second half of the nineteenth century, a shift usually attributed to the rolling and steel-cutting mills that made oats cheap and shelf-stable, and to a general enthusiasm among domestic reformers for whole grains as wholesome food. Fannie Farmer's book, published for the Boston Cooking School in 1896, treats oatmeal as an ordinary pantry staple rather than a novelty, and this recipe reflects that: it is a plain rolled cookie in the New England manner, cut with a cutter rather than dropped, with no spice, no raisins and no butter at all he fream. The soft drop cookie loaded with butter, brown sugar and raisins that most people now picture arrived later, often said to have spread through the recipes printed on oat packaging in the twentieth century.