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Oatmeal Cookies
½ cup sugar
1 teaspoon cloves
½ cup molasses
1 teaspoon soda
¾ cup fat
2 cups flour
2 eggs
1 cup chopped raisins
¼ cup sweet milk
2 cups oatmeal
2 teaspoons cinnamon
Mix ingredients in the order given. Melt the fat before adding it, and sift the soda and spices with the flour. Drop by teaspoonfuls on greased pans and bake in a moderate oven (380° F.).
A plain drop cookie from the era when molasses and soda did the leavening work. The proportions are sound; only a few terms need translating.
- Oatmeal means rolled oatsOld-fashioned rolled oats, uncooked, measured dry. Quick oats will work but give a softer, more cake-like cookie; steel-cut oats will not soften in the short bake and should not be substituted.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh milk, as opposed to the soured or buttermilk that many recipes of the period called for. Whole milk is the closest match.
- FatThe book does not specify which fat; lard, butter, or vegetable shortening would all suit. Melted butter gives the best flavour; three-quarters of a cup is 12 tablespoons.
- The soda needs the molassesThere is no baking powder here. The teaspoon of soda is neutralised by the acid in the molasses, so use real molasses rather than a light syrup or the cookies will taste soapy and spread flat.
- Oven temperatureThe 380°F given is workable as printed; 375°F on a modern thermostat is close enough. Bake 10 to 12 minutes, until the edges set and the centres still look slightly soft.
- Add saltNo salt is listed. A half teaspoon sifted with the flour improves the result noticeably.
- Chopped raisinsChopping helps them distribute through a thin drop cookie rather than sitting as lumps. A quick toss in a spoonful of the measured flour keeps them from clumping.
- YieldRoughly three to four dozen cookies from teaspoon-sized drops. Leave two inches between them; the melted fat and soda make them spread.
Oatmeal moved from the porridge bowl into American baking in the last decades of the nineteenth century, helped along by the rolled-oat mills that made the grain cheap, uniform and shelf-stable in a way that older cut or ground oats were not. Recipes of this type — oats, molasses, soda, spices and raisins — show up across community cookbooks and manufacturers' pamphlets of the period, and the family resemblance is strong enough that no single origin can honestly be claimed for any of them. Butterick, better known for dress patterns, also published household and cookery books aimed at much the same readership. The heavy hand with cloves and cinnamon and the reliance on molasses rather than more sugar are both marks of thrift, molasses being the cheaper sweetener for most of the nineteenth century.