New England Raisin Drops: or, Raisin-rationing for visual flair

They baited me with the words "New England" in the recipe name.

Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange, June 21 1935, page 12

New England Raisin Drops 1 cup sugar ¼ cup shortening ¼ cup butter 1 tsp baking soda ½ tsp salt 1 tsp baking powder 1 egg, well-beaten 1 cup thick sour milk, or buttermilk* 3 cups flour Raisins Cinnamon-sugar for sprinkling Heat oven to 375°. Grease a cookie sheet. Cream the sugar, butter, shortening, baking soda, baking powder, and salt. Add the egg, beat well. Then mix in the flour. Drop by the teaspoon onto baking sheets. This dough doesn't spread. It keeps its shape as you put it onto the pan. So if you prefer more neatly-shaped cookies, roll them into small balls before baking. Place three raisins onto each cookie, and press them into place. Then sprinkle the cookies with cinnamon sugar. Bake 10-12 minutes, or until golden on the bottom. (You can also tell they're done when the raisins puff up like balloons.) *You can also use sour cream. Bertha Lyman Shellington, 3 West Park Avenue, Haddonfield, NJ; Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange, June 21 1935, page 12

These could have been named Raisin Drops. But Bertha Lyman Shellington called them New England Raisin Drops. With those two added words, these cookies became a tiny piece of that part of the country where they have beautiful colors in the autumn, quaint houses from the 1600s, and crowds of summer tourists making pilgrimages to the places named in the first chapter of their American History textbooks. 

Bertha Lyman Shellington tells us to use "shortening and butter, mixed" in the ingredients list. I've heard people say you get the best results in baking if you use both of them. Apparently, you get the flavor of the butter, but the shortening prevents the cookies from going too runny in the oven. However, I distrust shortening, with its unnatural whiteness and unnerving flavorlessness. Even cooking oil at least tastes like something. But we are going to follow the directions in the recipe, and blame the Philadelphia Inquirer if these are bad.

The creamed-together mixture was an odd color. It wasn't yellow enough to look right, but it wasn't white enough to look scientifically, artificially pure- the way anything made with shortening apparently should. 

At least the egg managed to make this a more normal-looking color.

The recipe tells us to use "thick, sour milk." Naturally, I used sour cream. The resulting mixture looked like cake batter and tasted oddly like a cheap cheesecake. By the way, that's not a bad thing.

After we had the cookie dough loaded with flour and ready to bake, it still tasted cheesecake-adjacent. It also tasted like it really wanted vanilla. 

The recipe next directs us to drop the cookies and bedeck them with the title ingredient: raisins.

Raisins bring out the weirdest things in people. Some people sanctimoniously give them out on Halloween, convinced that they are the vanguards in the crusade against candy.  Others passionately hate raisins every time they appear in otherwise good food. And if you're Bertha Shellington Lyman, you ration your raisins with mathematical precision. We are told to place exactly three raisins on each cookie. Three shalt be the number of raisins we shalt count, and the number of the raisins shall be three. Four shalt we not count, neither count we two, excepting that we then proceed to three. Five is right out.

I don't understand why we're supposed to be so rigorous with the raisins. If we were shaping the cookies into cute little crescents or using a cookie cutter, I can see how we might be more concerned with cookie aesthetics. But these are bumpy, charmingly-homemade drop cookies. I'd have stirred the raisins into the dough instead.

After I followed the written directions and did my best to achieve visually harmonious raisin placement, I thought the cookies would spread and come out of the oven looking like, you know, cookies. Instead, they ended up looking like the same dough lumps I had dropped on the pan a few minutes earlier. The raisins barely clung to the cookies, and fell off as soon as you touched one.

Did you ever see a sorrier sight?

The raisins tasted burnt and the cookies were too hard. I partially blame myself for this because I turned the oven too high. However, I only did that because Bertha Lyman Shellington specifically said to "bake in a hot oven." I reduced the temperature to a more moderate setting for successive batches, and also shaped the cookies into little balls instead of dropping them from a spoon. They came out looking like cute raisin poufs instead of like cookie clumps with raisin blisters.

Incidentally, I love how any cookies with raisins tell you when they're done. Without fail, the cookies are perfectly baked when the raisins puff up like brown balloons. (Don't worry, they deflate as soon as you remove them from the oven.)

These cookies are decent enough cake drops, but Mrs. George O. Thurn did them better. They had a nice texture: soft, fluffy, and ever-so-slightly dense. But they tasted like nothing. Would it have killed Bertha Lyman Shellington to add some damn vanilla? Weirdly, you could barely taste the raisins at all. Were they merely for presentation?

When you plucked the raisins off the cookies, they looked so much prettier. I haven't seen a recipe that was so much improved by removing the title ingredient since we made the pepper cake without pepper. If I make these cookies again, I might actually put five raisins on each of them so they look like little sand dollars after I remove them. I would also add some sort of flavoring.

The cookies were fine, if a bit underwhelming. Maybe the New England Raisin Drops were victims of my own anticipation. I was excited for a beraisined taste of New England, and you can't expect a cookie to conjure up an iced coffee on a cold evening in a park surrounded by rowhouses when the trees have turned red, yellow, and bright orange. But if we make these again, I'm definitely adding some sort of flavoring to them.