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Oatmeal Cookies
1¼ cupfuls sugar 1 teaspoonful powdered cinnamon 1 cupful Crisco 1 teaspoonful powdered ginger 3 cupfuls rolled oats 2 eggs ½ cupful sour milk 1 cupful stoned chopped dates 1 teaspoonful baking soda 2 cupfuls flour 1 teaspoonful salt Cream Crisco and sugar thoroughly together, add eggs well-beaten, rolled oats, dates, salt, spices, soda dissolved in milk, and flour. Mix and drop from spoon on Criscoed baking tins. Bake in moderate oven from ten to twelve minutes. tar.
Sufficient for forty-five cookies.
A straightforward drop cookie, but the ingredient list as printed has been mangled — the quantities need reading with some judgement before you start.
- The stray flour lineThe sugar, flour and sour milk quantities were checked against the printed page and read as our text now gives them. A stray "4 cupfuls flour" still trails after the method, with no place in the recipe; use the 2 cupfuls called for in the ingredient list. The dough should hold its shape on the spoon.
- CriscoThe book exists to sell it, and the recipe is built around it. One cup of any solid vegetable shortening behaves the same way; the same weight of butter gives more spread and more flavour. "Criscoed baking tins" just means greased.
- Sour milkNot spoiled milk but naturally soured raw milk, acidic enough to react with the soda. Use buttermilk, or milk soured with a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar to the cup, left to stand ten minutes.
- Soda dissolved in milkDissolving the baking soda in the sour milk starts the reaction immediately, so mix it in last and get the trays into the oven promptly rather than letting the bowl stand.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350-375F. At that temperature ten to twelve minutes is right for a small drop cookie; they will still look soft in the centre when done and firm as they cool.
- Rolled oatsOld-fashioned rolled oats, not instant or steel-cut. Quick oats work but give a softer, less chewy cookie.
- Dates"Stoned" means pitted. Pitted dates today are usually softer and stickier than the 1913 article; chop them with a little of the measured flour to keep them from clumping.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to teach cooks what to do with a product nobody had asked for: hydrogenated cottonseed oil, sold as a shortening that would not go rancid in a warm pantry and promoted as an economical alternative to butter and lard. The book's recipes are conventional American home cooking with the fat swapped out and the brand name inserted as both ingredient and verb — hence "Criscoed baking tins." This cookie is a period type in its own right: oats, sour milk and soda belong to a tradition of thrifty baking that predates the shortening by decades, and dates were a standard dried fruit for such doughs, imported in quantity — chiefly from the Middle East, California's own plantings still being young in the early 1900s. The stray "4 cupfuls flour" at the end looks like a transcription artefact of the original ingredient layout, where quantities and items ran in parallel columns and collide when run together as a single line.