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Rocks
One and one-half cupfuls of brown sugar, one cupful of butter, three well-beaten eggs, one teaspoonful of soda dissolved in a little hot water, one teaspoonful of cinnamon, pinch of salt, three-quarters of a pound of raisins, one-half pound of English walnuts, two cupfuls of flour. Try and if runs too much add more flour. Drop on buttered tins and bake; should be the size of macaroons.
A late-Victorian drop cookie, heavy on fruit and nuts and light on flour. The recipe gives no oven temperature or time at all, so the two things to fix are heat and dough consistency.
- Oven and timeBake at 350F for 12 to 15 minutes, until the edges are set and the tops no longer look wet. These scorch easily because of the brown sugar and the exposed raisins, so check at 10 minutes on the first tray.
- Butter and sugarOne cupful of butter is 8 oz, two sticks, and it should be soft enough to cream but not melted. Brown sugar of the period was generally less refined than modern light brown sugar, so dark brown sugar is likely the closer match for flavour.
- The sodaA teaspoon of soda dissolved in hot water is the only leavening. Brown sugar is mildly acidic and provides just enough reaction; add the dissolved soda last and get the trays into the oven promptly, as the lift fades on standing.
- English walnutsThis is the ordinary walnut, named to distinguish it from the stronger native black walnut. The recipe does not say whether the half pound is weighed shelled or in the shell; half a pound of shelled nutmeats is about 2 cups, coarsely broken rather than chopped fine.
- RaisinsThree-quarters of a pound is about 2 1/4 cups. Period raisins were often seeded at home and slightly dry; if yours are hard, plump them briefly in hot water and pat dry or they will pull moisture from the dough.
- "If runs too much add more flour"Two cupfuls of flour to this much butter and egg gives a batter that spreads. Add flour a few tablespoons at a time until a dropped spoonful holds a mound; chilling the dough 30 minutes does the same work without making the cookies dry.
- Size and spacingMacaroons were small cakes, so a rounded tablespoon of dough with 2 inches between mounds is about the right scale. Parchment is easier than buttered tins and prevents the sugary bottoms sticking.
- YieldFour to six dozen, depending on how large the mounds are dropped. They keep well in a tin for a week and firm up as they cool.
"Rocks" appear in American household cookbooks from the late nineteenth century into the 1920s, under that name and, in close variants, as hermits and rock cakes. The name seems to describe the finished look and texture rather than any ingredient: a craggy, fruit-studded drop cookie that dries to a firm keeping biscuit, in contrast to the softer rolled and cut cookies of the same books. The heavy proportion of raisins and walnuts to flour is telling: by the turn of the century California walnuts and California raisins had both become cheap and widely available in grocery stores, and cookbooks of the period lean hard on them. The instruction to test the batter and add flour by eye is typical of recipes written down from practice rather than measured out for print.