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Hermits
(England.) Mix 2 eggs, 2 cups brown sugar, 1/2 cup butter, 1/2 a cup of currants, 1 teaspoonful of chopped cloves, the same each of grated nutmeg and soda, melted in water, and of cinnamon. Beat all well, add enough flour to make a stiff paste, and roll out thin. Cut in rounds, and bake in a hot oven.
A spice cookie written in the shorthand of its day: no flour quantity, no time, no yield. The dough is a rolled cookie, so the flour is added by feel until it is stiff enough to take a rolling pin.
- The hinge: how much flour"Enough flour to make a stiff paste" works out to roughly 3 1/2 to 4 cups for this quantity of sugar, butter and egg. Add it a cup at a time and stop when the dough holds a fingerprint without sticking; too much and the cookies bake dry and hard rather than chewy.
- Chill before rollingThe dough is soft at room temperature. An hour in the refrigerator makes it possible to roll thin, about 1/8 inch, and to cut clean rounds.
- "A hot oven"In period usage that is generally reckoned somewhere around 400-425F. For thin rolled cookies, 375-400F for 8 to 10 minutes is safer; at the top of that range they scorch on the bottom before the centres set. Bake until the edges are firm and the middles still look slightly soft.
- Chopped clovesThis means whole cloves chopped or pounded, not ground clove from a jar. A full teaspoon of modern ground cloves is aggressive; 1/2 teaspoon gives about the same force, with the nutmeg and cinnamon kept at a full teaspoon each.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, which are small dried grapes, not fresh red or black currants. Half a cup is about 2 1/2 oz. Chop them roughly if you want them to distribute through a thin rolled dough.
- Soda melted in waterBaking soda, dissolved in a tablespoon or two of warm water and stirred in last. The mild acidity of the brown sugar is what it has to react with, there being no other acid in the mixture.
- ButterHalf a cup is one stick, 4 oz. Soften it rather than melting it, and cream it with the sugar before the eggs go in; the recipe's "beat all well" is doing the work of an aeration step.
- YieldThe recipe gives none; rolled thin and cut at 2 inches, a batch this size makes a great many. They keep well in a tin for a week and firm up as they sit, which is part of the point of the style.
Hermits are a New England cookie, often said to have come from the mid-nineteenth-century seaport towns of Massachusetts, where a hard, well-spiced, fruit-studded bar or round was said to keep for weeks and travel well in a sailor's chest — though this is the popular origin story rather than documented provenance, and printed hermit recipes are a later-nineteenth-century phenomenon. The name has never been convincingly explained; the usual story is that the dark, wrinkled, plain-looking cookie was thought to resemble a hermit's brown robe, but that is folklore rather than documented etymology. The "(England)" attribution here says more about the book than the cookie: this is a collection of dishes gathered under national headings for American readers, and English spice biscuits with currants and clove sit close enough to the hermit that the two were easily conflated. The spicing itself, cloves and nutmeg and cinnamon bought whole and pounded at home, is the older habit showing through.