Home › Dainty Dishes › Fruit Cookies
Fruit Cookies
One cupful of butter, two cupfuls of sugar, brown; one cupful of chopped raisins, three eggs, one teaspoonful of soda, three tablespoonfuls water, season with cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg. Roll as soft as possible.
A typical late-Victorian cookie formula: it lists the enrichments and leaves the flour, the oven and the baking time to the cook's judgment. A few decisions have to be made before you start.
- The flour is missingNo quantity is given, and the recipe's own "roll as soft as possible" implies the cook added flour until the dough handled. Expect roughly 4 to 4 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour for this much butter, sugar and egg; add it gradually and stop while the dough is still tacky.
- "Roll as soft as possible"This is the hinge of the recipe. A dough stiff enough to roll easily has too much flour and bakes hard and dry. Keep it barely rollable, chill it an hour, then roll on a well-floured board about 1/4 inch thick.
- Soda and waterThe three tablespoons of water are most likely there to dissolve the teaspoon of soda, though the recipe does not say so; dissolving it helps avoid pockets of undissolved soda that read as brown flecks and bitter spots. Stir it in last and get the trays into the oven without long delay.
- No acid, brown sugar onlyThere is no buttermilk or added molasses here; what acidity the soda has to work with comes from the molasses in the brown sugar, and the soda will also release some gas on heating regardless. Dark brown sugar, packed when measured, gives the most of it.
- OvenThe original assumes the cook knows. Bake at 375F for 8 to 10 minutes, until the edges are set and the centers still look slightly underdone.
- Spices"Season with cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg" means to taste. A teaspoon of cinnamon, half a teaspoon of freshly grated nutmeg and a quarter teaspoon of ground cloves suits this quantity; cloves overwhelm quickly.
- RaisinsChop them by hand, or pulse briefly — a food processor turns them to paste. Tossing the chopped fruit with a spoonful of the flour keeps it from clumping in the dough.
- YieldAbout five to six dozen cookies of 2 1/2 inches. The dough keeps several days wrapped in the refrigerator.
Fruit cookies of this kind sit at the point where the rolled spice cookie of the nineteenth century meets the raisin-heavy "hermit" style that American cookbooks were printing by the 1880s and 1890s: brown sugar, soda, chopped raisins and the standard trio of cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg. Those seasonings were cheap and shelf-stable by this date, and raisins had become an ordinary grocery item rather than a holiday luxury, which is why a cookie built almost entirely on pantry goods needed no apology. The terse form is characteristic of such compilations: the recipe records the proportions and trusts the reader to supply the flour, the rolling and the oven.