Pumpkin cookies: or, Tis the season for pumpkin spice!

To quote countless cutesy yard signs and festive decorations, it's fall y'all! Canned pumpkin is in season, and everyone has been bountifully harvesting it from the supermarket.

Pumpkin Cookies 1¼ c brown sugar ½ c shortening 2 eggs ¾ c canned pumpkin 1 tsp vanilla 1 tsp lemon extract ½ tsp salt ¼ tsp ginger ½ tsp nutmeg ½ tsp cinnamon 4 tsp baking powder 2½ c flour 1 c raisins 1 c chopped nuts Heat oven to 400°. Grease a baking sheet. Cream sugar, shortening, seasonings, and baking powder. Add egg, beat well. Stir in pumpkin. When all is well mixed, add the flour. Add raisins and nuts, blend thoroughly. Drop by the teaspoon* onto the baking sheet. Bake 15 minutes. *We recommend a half-tablespoon if your measuring spoon set has one. If not, we recommend a very heaping teaspoon. Mrs. M. Peterson, 321 Cottman St, Jenkintown, Pennsylvania; Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange, October 11 1935, p. 16

Yes, today we are once again entrusting our kitchen to the Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange! In a salute to our last precious days of freedom before Christmas consumes us all, we are making pumpkin cookies!

Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange, October 11 1935, p. 16

As we commenced, I am reminded of just how much a dishwasher has changed my life. I forgot to soften the butter before throwing the other things in the bowl, necessitating that I get out yet another dish so I could give the butter a quick half-spin in the microwave. 

In the pre-dishwasher days, I would have resented that tiny little bowl as it sat in the sink with the other dirty dishes. Later, I would have muttered bitterly while I hand-washed every little thing one at a time with an ever-smellier sponge, and then carefully placed each bowl, plate, and spoon on a rack. But now that a dishwasher lives in the house, I merely have to place every drippy bowl and greasy plate in the machine, press a button, and forget all about it while the machine does its magic. Cooking gets so much easier when you no longer avoid using any kitchen utensils.

In nearly no time at all, we arrived at the only ingredient that gave me pause: lemon extract. This is the first time I have used it since we bottled away the peels from the lemon cream cookies to marinate in alcohol. Upon opening it, the extract smelled so strongly of lemon that one would think I was holding the bottle directly under my nose. After just a few seconds, the lemony scent had subtly drifted all over the kitchen. 

 

This brings us to my question: what the heck is the lemon doing in this recipe? In all my long experience with pumpkin spice, I have never seen the spices of autumn intermingle with the citrus of summer. But after giving it some thought, I realized that the lemon-cinnamon Beaver Tails were unexpectedly delicious. So, despite my citrus-related suspicions, I decided to see if Mrs. M. Peterson with her lemony pumpkin was more correct than I credited her. Also, I could blame her if a spoonful of extract ruined the cookies.

And now, we reach our happy title ingredient: pumpkin! For a recipe called pumpkin cookies, this recipe doesn't use a whole lot of it. Even if you don't halve the recipe, you'll still being putting a surprisingly full can of pumpkin back into the refrigerator.

After we mixed in our happy orange splats of autumn, everything looked curdled, lumpy, and ruined. I figured no harm could come from adding the flour to this hopeless-looking sugar soup and then giving it a whirl in the oven.

Reassuringly, the flour fixed the pumpkin batter and gave us a cookie dough very much like the Reese's cookies. It was at the same intersection of firm and runny. I had a lot more hope for the pumpkin cookies than I had about a minute earlier.

In baking the first batch, I applied a baking lesson that took me far too long to learn: don't crowd your friggin cookies! I have spent far too much time cutting countless batches of cookies apart, and now I realize it's easier to just accept that you will be spending a bit more time moving cookie sheets in and out of the oven. Since these cookies looked like they would really want to spread, I gave them so much space that they couldn't possibly merge even if they went completely flat. And just in case, I used the baking sheet that has raised sides. Barring a serious oven mishap, nothing would spill over the edge and burn on the oven floor. I needn't have worried about the cookies melting into a hot mess. They didn't spread at all.

In addition to being unusually well-behaved while baking, these cookies tell you when they're ready. When the raisins inflate like balloons, the cookies are done.

You just never know how cookie dough will act in the oven. Sometimes, dough that feels like hard clay in your hands melts into a hot sticky mess. And sometimes, the dough that is barely thicker than cake batter steadfastly holds its shape. 

As previously mentioned with the almond cookies, I have to wonder: did people in those days expect drop cookies to look like baked plops? Or did every recipe for drop cookies have an implied instruction to shape the dough a bit after dropping it onto the pan? Maybe people thought mound-shaped cookies were charmingly homemade in the 1930s.

In an attempt to make the remaining cookies look at least a little better, I flattened them before baking. The dough was extremely sticky, but I simply spritzed each dough-pile with cooking spray before gently patting them into something at least a little cookie-shaped. The extra dough-shaping didn't make as much of a difference as you might think, though the flattened cookies are a bit smoother and finished-looking on top.You can only see the difference if you put them side by side:

However, these cookies are very obviously from the pre-Instagram days of baking. I am fond of making recipes from the days when no one cared if their cooking would win points on social media. There's something so lovely and pure about making food meant to be enjoyed without worrying about whether it can compete on The 'Gram.

Whether I shaped my pumpkin cookies nicely or just dropped them off of a spoon, they were more like freeform pumpkin cakes than cookies. But they're good pumpkin cakes.  I didn't add any nuts to this batch (even though the recipe says to), but we all agreed that hazelnuts would be perfect. If you like pumpkin bread but hate the inconvenience of slicing it, these cookies are exactly what you never knew you could wish for. They are flavorful, and have that same rich denseness as a good pound cake. 

You can really see how cake-like they are if you split one open. I now want to quadruple the recipe and make the orange-colored, pumpkin-flavored bundt of my autumn dreams.

However, since these are more like freeform cakes than cookies, you have to store them accordingly. They go stale if you just leave them out on a plate or drop them in a cookie jar. So if you make pumpkin cookies ahead of time for whatever occasion prompts a bit of autumn on a platter, be sure to wrap them well. 

While we're on the subject of wrapping these cookies, you will have a lot of cookies to store. The recipe promises "three dozen good-sized cookies." I halved the recipe, measured the dough by the heaping half-tablespoon, and got... three dozen good-sized cookies. Clearly my cookies weren't good-sized enough for Mrs. M. Peterson. Perhaps the overly long baking time would have been correct had I made these cookies as big as she apparently did.

In closing, if you like pumpkin bread, you will like these cookies. They're basically muffin tops with no muffin stem attached. In other words, they're like pumpkin bread without the inconvenience of a plate and fork. If you want little freeform pumpkin cakes, Mrs. M. Peterson has you covered!