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Chocolate Drop Cookies
1/4 cup fat 1/2 cup milk 1/2 teaspoon soda cup fat 1 cup light brown sugar 1 well-beaten egg cup milk 1½ cup flour teaspoon soda 2 squares melted chocolate 1 cup chopped nuts 1 teaspoon_vanilla Cream the shortening, add the brown sugar gradually, then the wellbeaten egg, milk and the flour, mixed and sifted with the soda. Stir in the melted chocolate, chopped nuts and vanilla. Drop mixture by spoonfuls onto a well-buttered pan 1 inch apart and bake in a moderate oven 350°F.
The text has come through with several fractions lost, so read the ingredient list with care before you start. Note also that the last line — "cup fat, 1 cup sugar, 2 beaten eggs, 1/4 cup milk" — belongs to the recipe that followed on the page and has nothing to do with these cookies.
- The missing fractions"cup fat", "cup milk" and "teaspoon soda" have lost their leading fractions in transcription. For a batter of this type the fat is probably ½ cup, the milk ¼ cup, and the soda ½ teaspoon. Treat these as reconstructions, not the original amounts.
- Squares of chocolateA square meant a 1-ounce block of unsweetened baking chocolate, so 2 squares is 2 oz. Modern bars are usually scored into 1-oz sections; sweetened chocolate will make the cookies cloying against a full cup of brown sugar.
- Fat"Fat" or "shortening" here means lard, vegetable shortening or butter, whichever the household had. Butter gives the best flavour and slightly more spread.
- Oven350°F is stated, so no conversion is needed. Bake on the middle rack.
- Baking timeNone is given. Drop cookies of this size take 9 to 12 minutes; pull them when the edges are set and the centres still look soft, as they firm considerably on cooling.
- SpacingOne inch apart is too close for a soft milk-and-soda batter. Allow two inches, or the cookies will run together at the edges.
- Pan"Well-buttered pan" means a flat baking sheet. Parchment does the job better and avoids the scorched butter film that darkens the undersides.
- YieldAbout 30 to 36 cookies, depending on the size of the spoonfuls.
The Metropolitan Cook Book was published by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and given away free to policyholders — one of the great American corporate cookbooks, distributed in the millions across the first half of the twentieth century alongside the company's pamphlets on hygiene and infant care. Its recipes are deliberately plain and cheap, which is why the fat here is simply "fat" rather than butter, and why the leavening is soda rather than baking powder: the soda worked against the acidity of the brown sugar and chocolate. The chocolate measured in "squares" reflects the packaging of the day, when unsweetened baking chocolate came as a bar scored into one-ounce blocks, a convention that lasted long enough that many American recipes still call for squares rather than ounces.