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Lace Cakes
One cup rolled oats; one egg; one-half cup of light brown sugar; tablespoon of soft butter; little salt and vanilla. Add the sugar to the beaten egg and then mix other ingredients and add. Drop in spoonfuls on greased baking-sheet and spread very thin. Bake in moderate oven.
HERMITS-One half cup butter; one-half cup of sugar; two eggs; one teaspoon each of all kinds of spice; one tablespoon molasses; one cup of chopped raisins and one-half teaspoon of soda dissolved in a little water; mix up quite stiff and roll. CREAM PUFFS AND ÉCLAIRS-Place in a saucepan one cup boiling water and two tablespoons of butter; bring to a boil and stir in thoroughly one cup of flour. Remove from the fire, let the mixture cool slightly and add the eggs one at at time, beating in each one for some time before adding the next. Drop by spoonfuls on a buttered pan about two inches apart, shaping into a circular form and having the batter a little higher in the center. Bake one-half hour in a moderate oven.
When done, cool and split partially with a sharp knife. Fill with Cream Filling. See chapter on Cake Fillings and Frostings. CHOCOLATE, COFFEE AND VANILLA ÉCLAIRS-Make the preceding cream cake mixture and press it through a pastry bag on to a buttered tin forming strips three and one-half inches long and one inch wide. Keep the strips a little distance apart. Bake as before; partially split lengthwise, and fill with Cream Filling. Frost the top half of the éclairs by dipping them into boiled frosting, flavored with chocolate, vanilla or coffee.
Four recipes run together here under one heading, which was normal in 1911 when column space was tight. The lace cakes are the only ones fully specified; the other three assume a cook who already knows the proportions.
- Moderate ovenRead this as 350F. For the lace cakes, 325-350F on parchment is safer, since a thin oat batter with that much brown sugar goes from caramel to bitter in under a minute.
- Rolled oatsUse old-fashioned rolled oats, not instant or steel-cut. Quick oats absorb too fast and the batter will not spread into lace.
- There is no flour in the lace cakesThat is not an omission. The sugar melts and the oats float in it, which is what makes the open, lacy web. Spread the spoonfuls thin and leave three inches between them; the recipe gives no yield.
- Let them set before liftingLace cakes are limp and tear straight from the oven. Give them two or three minutes on the sheet, then move them with a thin spatula.
- Hermits: flour is unstatedThe instruction to "mix up quite stiff and roll" requires flour that the recipe never lists. A rolled hermit dough of this size normally takes somewhere around two and a half to three cups, but the original gives no figure and any number here is a guess. Add it gradually until the dough rolls without sticking.
- "One teaspoon each of all kinds of spice"In a pantry of this period this would most likely have meant cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and allspice, perhaps mace. A teaspoon of each is assertive but not wrong for hermits; a teaspoon of cloves is the one to consider halving.
- Choux paste: egg count is missingThe cream puff recipe says "add the eggs" without saying how many. The standard ratio for one cup water and one cup flour is four large eggs, beaten in one at a time until the paste falls from the spoon in a thick ribbon. Judge by texture, not count.
- Dry the shells outHalf an hour at 350F is about right, but do not open the oven early. Puffs that come out before the interior walls are dry will collapse. The original says to cool and then split; splitting while still warm lets the steam escape, but fill only once cold.
- Boiled frosting for the eclairsThe dipping glaze is a hot sugar syrup beaten into egg white, from the fillings chapter. It sets firm and dulls quickly, so dip the eclairs as soon as it is spreadable.
Lace cakes belong to a family of thin, spreading oat wafers that turn up in American and northern European baking alike, the Scandinavian havreflarn being the closest relative; the effect depends on nothing more than sugar melting around oats with almost no flour to hold it back. Rolled oats had only recently become a cheap, uniform pantry staple when this book appeared, following the rise of large-scale rolling mills in the 1880s and 1890s, and cookbooks of the period are full of small ways to use them beyond porridge. The neighbours on this page show how loosely the chapter is organised: hermits, a spiced raisin cookie whose name is generally traced to New England and often said to refer to their brown, monkish look, sit next to pate a choux, a French professional preparation that Butterick's readers were plainly expected to attempt at home.