Spicy Oatmeal Raisin Cookies
Chewy, spiced oatmeal raisin cookies with cloves and cinnamon, from Great-grandmother Clara Weidman Baker's recipe box.
Jennifer Ann Blair writes about food, wine, and the stories that live in recipe boxes.
Clara Weidman Baker’s recipe box held a lot of wisdom in a small space. Her oatmeal cookies held the cloves. Warm and a little unexpected, like most good inheritances. Her recipe listed no baking time. She instinctively knew how long to cook things, the kind of knowledge that lived in her hands, not on the card.
Her version called for butter and lard mixed together, and sweet milk. Details that tell you exactly when and where a recipe was made.
These heritage cookies are chewy, satisfying, and last for weeks in the fridge. Ideal for a very good breakfast or a Tuesday afternoon.
Notes
This can all be done in today’s mixer, quicker, and slightly easier, though I chose to make it the way Clara would have with spoons, whisks, and bowls.
Sweet milk is an old-fashioned term for whole milk, used to distinguish it from buttermilk or sour milk. Clara would have written it exactly that way. Use whole milk.
Lard in Clara's day meant the real thing. I use Spectrum Naturals Organic Vegetable Shortening. It’s gluten-free, widely available at Sprouts, Whole Foods, and Trader Joe's, and on Amazon.
Yield depends on the size of your cookie. Small cookies yield about 3 dozen and can be baked in under 30 minutes if you have enough sheet pans to run multiple batches simultaneously. Larger cookies yield fewer.
I used two modern cookie scoops, testing each batch at 1 tablespoon and 2 tablespoons. The larger scoop made larger cookies, which also required longer cooking time. For larger cookies, I tested at 8 minutes then 12, but my oven needed 14 to 16 minutes. For smaller cookies, 12 minutes was right.
Oven temperatures vary and humidity affects baking. Use the visual cue, just golden at the edges, as your guide rather than the clock alone.
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Jennifer Ann Blair writes about food, wine, and the stories that live in recipe boxes.
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