Home › Bread, Biscuits, Muffins and Waffles › Oatmeal Drops
Oatmeal Drops
cup brown sugar 3/4 cup butter (or substitute) 1½ cups Ravalli rolled oats 1 1 1 1 cup Northern flour egg cup sour milk level teaspoonful soda 1/2 teaspoonful salt 11/½ 1 cups raisins Cream sugar and butter, add egg, soda and sour milk, raisins and salt in sifted flour and oatmeal. Drop by spoonfuls on greased pan. 2
A plain sour-milk drop cookie of the kind that filled a biscuit tin between baking days. The ingredient column has run together in places, so a few of the quantities need judgement rather than blind conversion.
- Ambiguous quantitiesThe sugar, egg, sour milk and soda amounts are run together in the original and cannot be read with confidence; the raisin quantity is also unclear. For a batch built on 1 1/2 cups rolled oats and 1 cup flour, one egg, about 1 cup sugar, 1 cup sour milk, 1 level teaspoon soda and 1 to 1 1/2 cups raisins are all consistent with the method, but the source does not settle it.
- Brand namesRavalli rolled oats and Northern flour appear to be proprietary brands of the period; the mills behind them are not established here. Any old-fashioned rolled oats and all-purpose flour will do; do not substitute quick or instant oats, which turn the dough pasty.
- Sour milk and sodaSour milk here is naturally clabbered raw milk, mildly acidic. Modern pasteurised milk will not sour usefully. Use buttermilk, or stir 1 tablespoon lemon juice or white vinegar into a cup of milk and let it stand ten minutes, so the soda has acid to work against.
- Butter or substituteThe parenthetical points to lard, shortening or oleomargarine, all common thrift substitutions. Butter gives the best flavour; shortening gives a slightly puffier drop.
- Order of mixingThe instruction is compressed. Cream the butter and sugar, beat in the egg, dissolve the soda in the sour milk and add that, then work in the flour, oats and salt sifted together. The original names the raisins before the flour and oatmeal, so add them with the dry ingredients.
- OvenNo temperature or time is given. Drop cookies of this size bake at 375F for 10 to 12 minutes, until the edges are set and lightly coloured; the centres should still look soft when they come out.
- YieldExpect roughly three dozen cookies from a batch of this size, spaced two inches apart on the pan.
Oatmeal drops belong to the era when rolled oats moved from the porridge pot into baking, promoted hard by the milling companies that sold them. The presence of named brands in the ingredient list is suggestive: community and bridal cookbooks of the early twentieth century were often assembled with local merchants and millers in mind, though in any given book a contributor may simply have written in the brand she trusted as a matter of course. Sour milk leavened with soda was the standard economy of a household that kept milk on hand and could not let it go to waste, and it survives in print long after most kitchens stopped having genuinely clabbered milk to use. The book files these under bread and biscuits rather than cakes, which reflects an older sense of "biscuit" as anything small, quick and baked.