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Fruit Cookies
1 cupful chopped raisins 1 cupful chopped English walnut meats 3 eggs 1 teaspoonful powdered cinnamon ½ teaspoonful powdered allspice 1 teaspoonful powdered ginger 1½ teaspoonfuls baking soda 2 tablespoonfuls sour milk Flour Cream Crisco and sugar together, add salt, eggs well beaten, soda mixed with milk, spices, raisins, nuts, and enough flour to make stiff dough. About 5 cupfuls flour will be sufficient. Roll out, cut with cooky cutter, lay on Criscoed tins and bake in moderate oven from ten to twelve minutes. Sufficient for sixty cookies. 1 cupful sugar ½ cupful Crisco 2 cupfuls flour
A plain rolled spice cookie from Procter & Gamble's 1913 Crisco promotional book. The ingredient list as printed is scrambled, with the fat and sugar stranded at the end and flour given twice, so read the whole thing before you begin.
- The ambiguous fat measureThe list gives 1½ cupfuls Crisco to 1 cupful sugar, an unusually high proportion of fat for a stiff rolled dough, which may be a typesetting error for ½ cupful. Start at the lower end if you want a dough that rolls and cuts cleanly.
- Two flour figures"2 cupfuls flour" appears in the list and "about 5 cupfuls" in the method. The method governs: add flour gradually until the dough is stiff enough to roll, and stop there rather than working to a number.
- Moderate ovenGenerally taken as somewhere in the 350–375°F range. Ten to twelve minutes suits a cookie rolled about ¼ inch thick; the edges should be set and just coloured.
- Crisco itselfThe hydrogenated cottonseed oil sold in 1913 is not the same product as the reformulated, low-trans-fat shortening on shelves now, though modern shortening behaves close enough. Butter can be substituted measure for measure, allowing for a slightly softer, more spreading cookie.
- Sour milk and sodaSour milk here means naturally soured milk, used as an acid ingredient. Use buttermilk, or milk with a few drops of lemon juice or vinegar. Two tablespoons of it is very little acid to neutralise 1½ teaspoons of soda; expect a faintly alkaline, darkly spiced cookie. Reducing the soda to ½ teaspoon gives a cleaner flavour.
- SaltThe method calls for salt but the list omits it. A half teaspoon suits this quantity of dough.
- Raisins and nutsChop both fine, or the dough tears when rolled. Flouring the raisins lightly keeps them from clumping.
- YieldSixty cookies from a small cutter, roughly two inches. "Criscoed tins" means greased flat baking sheets; parchment does the job now.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written to teach American cooks what to do with a fat that had no tradition behind it: hydrogenated cottonseed oil, launched by Procter & Gamble in 1911 as a substitute for both lard and butter. The recipes in it are deliberately unremarkable — the point was to prove the new shortening could stand in anywhere a household fat was called for, and the word "Crisco" appears in place of butter or lard on nearly every page, including as the verb "Criscoed." Fruit cookies of this kind, stiff enough to roll and cut, spiced heavily and stretched with raisins and walnuts, were standard keeping cookies stored in a tin or crock. The sour milk and soda leavening is older than the fat: it belongs to the nineteenth-century kitchen, where milk soured on its own and cooks used the acid rather than throwing it out.