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Hermits
½ cup butter or shortening
1 teaspoon each of all kinds of
½ cup sugar spice
2 eggs
½ teaspoon soda
1 cup chopped raisins
Flour
1 tablespoon molasses
Cream fat, add sugar gradually. Add eggs, molasses and raisins. Sift soda and spices with one cup of flour, and mix all thoroughly. Add enough flour to make quite a stiff dough, and roll. Bake in a moderate oven (380° F.).
A short, loosely written formula that assumes the cook knows what a stiff rolled dough feels like. Two things need pinning down: what "all kinds of spice" means and how much flour to add.
- "All kinds of spice"The book does not list them. In a book of this date the phrase most likely points to the standard sweet-spice shelf: cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and allspice, a teaspoon of each. Four teaspoons in a small batch is assertive but in keeping with hermits; ginger and mace are reasonable additions if you have them.
- How much flourStart with the one cup the spices are sifted into and add more by degrees, stopping when the dough holds a shape and is barely tacky; expect somewhere upwards of two cups in all, since the recipe fixes no quantity. Overshooting gives a dry, hard cookie, and the dough firms considerably after 30 minutes in the refrigerator, which makes rolling much easier.
- The ovenThe book already gives the number: 380°F. Anything from 350 to 375°F works, and the lower end is safer given the molasses and sugar, which brown fast.
- Rolling and cuttingRoll about ¼ inch thick and cut into rounds or squares. Bake 10 to 12 minutes, until the edges are set and the centers still look slightly soft; hermits harden as they cool and are ruined by an extra two minutes.
- Soda and molassesHalf a teaspoon of soda with only a tablespoon of molasses gives very little lift, there being little acid to work on. The result is a dense, chewy cookie rather than a puffed one. Do not substitute baking powder or increase the soda.
- Creaming the eggs inTwo eggs added at once to a half cup of creamed fat will look broken. Add them one at a time, and if the mixture still splits, a spoonful of the measured flour brings it back.
- RaisinsChop them small, as directed, and toss them with a little of the flour before mixing so they distribute rather than clumping and tearing the rolled dough.
- Yield and keepingRoughly three dozen cookies from a 2-inch cutter, though the yield follows from however much flour the dough took. They improve on the second day and keep a week or more in a tin; a slice of bread in the tin keeps them soft.
Hermits are a New England cookie, associated particularly with Massachusetts, and they turn up in American cookbooks from the later nineteenth century onward. The name has never been satisfactorily explained: it is variously said to come from the cookie's plain brown color, likened to a hermit's habit, or from the fact that hermits keep so well that they were provisioned for long voyages and stored away like a recluse. Both explanations are folk etymology rather than documented fact. What is documented is the type: a stiff, spiced, molasses-darkened, fruit-filled dough that survives storage far better than a butter cookie, which is exactly why a general-purpose household manual like Butterick's would include it among the small cakes.