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Oatmeal Cookies
1/2 cup fat 1/4 teaspoon salt cup fat 1 cup sugar 2 beaten eggs 1/4 cup milk. 2 cups oatmeal 2 cups flour 1 teaspoon soda 1 teaspoon cinnamon teaspoon salt 1 cup raisins Cream the fat, add the sugar gradually and work until creamy. Add the well-beaten eggs, milk and oatmeal, the flour, soda, cinnamon and salt mixed and sifted, and the raisins. Drop by teaspoonfuls on a buttered pan. Bake in a moderate oven 350° F.
The ingredient list as printed has suffered in the original typesetting — several quantities are broken or missing, and the fat, molasses and egg appear after the method rather than before it. Read the whole thing before you start.
- Reassemble the ingredients firstThe full list is 2 cups oatmeal, 2 cups flour, 1 teaspoon soda, 1 teaspoon cinnamon, salt, 1 cup raisins, melted shortening, 1 cup molasses and 1 egg. The method also calls for sugar and milk, neither of which is listed at all.
- The broken measurements"4 cup melted shortening" is a dropped fraction; ½ or ¾ cup would suit this quantity of dry ingredients, while ¼ would be very lean. "teaspoon salt" has likewise lost its fraction, probably ½. The sugar and milk amounts are simply absent; something like ½ cup sugar and ¼ to ½ cup milk would be in keeping. These are inferences, not the book's figures.
- Oatmeal means rolled oatsOld-fashioned rolled oats, uncooked, not steel-cut and not instant. Steel-cut will stay hard through the bake.
- Molasses and sodaThe teaspoon of soda is there to react with the acidic molasses; there is no baking powder in the recipe and none is needed. Unsulphured molasses gives a cleaner flavour than blackstrap, which can turn bitter in a cookie this dark.
- OvenThe book gives both the old word and a number: "a moderate oven 350° F." No time is given: expect 10 to 14 minutes, until the edges are set and the centres still look slightly soft.
- Buttered panMolasses doughs stick and scorch. Parchment on the sheet is a straightforward improvement, and it lets the cookies come off whole.
- Handling the doughMixed as written, the dough is soft and spreads. Chilling it 30 minutes gives thicker cookies and more even edges; leave 2 inches between spoonfuls either way.
- YieldRoughly three to four dozen teaspoon-sized cookies. They keep well for several days in a tin, and the molasses keeps them from drying out as fast as a butter-and-sugar cookie.
Cookbooks issued free by insurance companies were a common piece of early twentieth-century outreach: an agent calling on a household left behind a small book of plain, economical recipes with the company's name on the cover, and Metropolitan Life issued such booklets. The recipes suit that purpose — cheap fats, molasses instead of a full cup of sugar, oats to stretch the flour. Rolled oats had become an everyday pantry staple in the decades before this, once steam-rolling made them quick-cooking and the big American milling firms began advertising them heavily as a breakfast food; cooks put them into cookies, breads and puddings. A molasses-sweetened oatmeal cookie with raisins is very much a thrift recipe.