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Cookies
1/2 Cup Shortening 1 Cup Brown Sugar 1/2 Cup Sour Milk Teaspoon Soda 1/2 Teaspoon each Cinnamon, Cloves and Nutmeg 1 Cup Oat Flour, scant 1/2 Cup Oatmeal 11/2 Cup Purified Rice Bran 1/2 Cup Raisins Dissolve soda in milk. Drop on baking pan and flatten out with knife dipped in hot water. 1
A bran drop cookie of the health-baking sort, written in the shorthand of a cook who assumed the reader already knew how to make a cookie. Almost everything except the ingredient list has to be supplied.
- No oven temperature is givenNothing in the recipe indicates one. A drop cookie of this composition will do well somewhere around a moderate oven, say 350-375F, checked from about 10 minutes; bran and oat doughs brown on the bottom well before the tops look done.
- No mixing method is given eitherBeyond dissolving the soda in the milk. The usual approach for a dough like this would be to cream the shortening and brown sugar, then alternate the soured milk with the combined dry ingredients and add the raisins last. The dough should be stiff enough to hold a mound.
- Sour milk and sodaSour milk here means naturally clabbered milk, acidic enough to react with the soda. Buttermilk is the direct substitute; failing that, make up the half cup with milk and about half a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar, left ten minutes. Pasteurised milk gone off is not the same thing and should be thrown out.
- Purified rice branA milling product, essentially the outer layer of the rice grain, sold as a digestive aid; "purified" appears to mean sifted and cleaned rather than anything more technical. Modern rice bran is the nearest equivalent. Unstabilised rice bran goes rancid quickly, so buy it fresh and keep it cold. Wheat bran can stand in, though it drinks more liquid.
- Oat flour and oatmealOat flour is available ready-milled, or grind rolled oats fine in a processor. "Oatmeal" in this context means rolled oats, not the cooked porridge and not steel-cut groats, which will stay hard.
- ShorteningIn American home baking this generally meant lard or, once available, hydrogenated vegetable fat. Butter works; the dough will spread slightly more.
- Flattening with a hot knifeThe dough is sticky from the bran and will not spread on its own. Dipping the blade in hot water between cookies is genuinely the right technique, and worth doing rather than pressing with a floured glass, which dries the surface.
- YieldNot stated; the quantities suggest several dozen small cookies. They should keep some days in a tin and will firm up as the bran absorbs moisture.
Bran cookies belong to the long American enthusiasm for roughage that ran from the Graham movement of the 1830s through the breakfast-cereal boom of the early twentieth century, when milling by-products that had previously gone to livestock were rebranded for human digestion. "Purified rice bran" reads as a period product name for bran sold specifically as a health food, and its appearance in a cookie recipe shows how quickly such products moved from the pharmacy shelf to ordinary baking. The sour-milk-and-soda leavening, meanwhile, is much older and entirely practical: in a house that kept milk without refrigeration, souring was inevitable, and the acid it produced was too useful to waste.