Fruit Cookies: or, Surprisingly fruitless yet satisfyingly good

I've been wondering how these would come out for years.

Fruit Cookies 1 cup butter, margarine,* or shortening 2 cups dark brown sugar 2 tsp cinnamon 1 tsp cloves 1 tsp nutmeg ¼ tsp salt† 1 tsp baking soda 3 eggs 2 tbsp cream 1 tsp vanilla 4 cups flour ½ cup chopped raisins ½ cup chopped nuts 1 cup chopped dates Heat oven to 375°. Have greased cookie sheets ready. Cream the butter, and sugar, spices, salt, and baking soda, beating until light and fluffy. Then beat each egg in thoroughly, one at a time. Add the cream and vanilla, beat well. Next, mix in the flour, stirring just until blended. The dough should be firm enough to shape in your hands. If it's sticky, add more flour. Then add the raisins, nuts, and dates. Roll into 1 to 1½-inch balls. Place 3 inches apart on the pan. Gently pat each one to make it flat and about a half-inch thick. Bake 10-12 minutes. These are better the next day. The spices get stronger. *Use the margarine that comes in sticks, not the spreadable kind that comes in tubs. †The original recipe calls for ⅓ teaspoon of salt. But I don't know anyone whose measuring spoons come with a one-third teaspoon. Rounding down to a quarter teaspoon won't hurt a thing. Omit the salt if using margarine or salted butter. Source: Handwritten note, The Woman's Club of Fort Worth Cook Book, 1928

When I borrowed my college library's copy of The Woman's Club of Fort Worth Cook Book, I couldn't resist scanning the handwritten recipes in the back. After all, someone had carefully saved these. Many of us save recipes on the odd scrap of paper, but writing them into a cookbook is a commitment. At the time, I thought it was a shame that the handwritten recipes were now locked in a library's special collections instead of in someone's kitchen- especially after the first one I tried (Elizabeth's Rolls) was so amazing that I still regularly make them.

Granted, I didn't think all of the recipes would be as good as Elizabeth's rolls. But all of them looked really good. Well, all of them except the chicken mousse, which involved ground-up cooked chicken, mayonnaise, and gelatin. But we're not here for that today. Today we are making fruit cookies! I had high hopes for this recipe because the page has a grease stain on it which became very obvious after I converted the image to black-and-white for printing.

I think I avoided this recipe for so long because I thought it had a daunting list of ingredients. After all, the ingredients take up most of the page, and the directions are awkwardly crammed into the tiny space that remains. 

But really, the only thing we didn't already have at home was the chopped dates. Now, the last time we used the extra-nice dates in a recipe, that turned out to be a pointless extravagance. So this time, I skipped the fancy produce aisle and got these.

It wounded my soul that no store-brand dates (chopped or otherwise) were available.

Anyway, I figured that this recipe would go a lot easier if I had everything measured out ahead of time. With simple recipes, it's usually no big deal to stop midway and measure out the flour. But while this recipe has a short set of instructions, it has a long list of ingredients.

This is the surprisingly small allowance of fruit and nuts that goes into the cookies: a handful each of dates and raisins. I always imagined that the recipe called for so much dried fruit that the cookie dough would barely hold them together. I mean, it is called "fruit cookies."

Setting the unexpectedly small fruit bowl aside, we also needed to measure out some assorted spices. The only annoying one was the cloves because I had to grind them myself. I didn't do this because think fresh-ground cloves taste magically better. We grind our own cloves because the last time I needed to buy them, the store only had whole cloves in stock. The pre-ground ones were all bought up and sold out. 

And so, every recipe that calls for cloves will involve a little detour with the spice grinder until the end of time. I don't necessarily mind this (fresh-ground cloves do taste a bit better if you have a grinder). But it does annoy me that we have to grind our own cloves because I bought them for what proved to be one of the blandest recipes ever featured on A Book of Cookrye.

Anyway, the last ingredient we needed was the first on the list: "1 cup fat." Because we at A Book of Cookrye are always economizing, we only had one viable option: beef fat. This way, we didn't have to pay for butter or for shortening. 

I can't believe I'm about to say this, but you can't tell something is fishy when a dessert contains beef fat. I even swapped beef fat for butter in a batch of shortbread cookies (a recipe that has no spices to camouflage an unexpected intrusion of cow) and brought them to a family gathering without telling anyone what was in them. No one suspected a thing.

Anyway, this recipe starts off the way so many do: creaming the "butter" and sugar. Our recipe writer's handwriting, like my own, is a bit hard to read in some places. Sometimes you have to make a guess based on two recognizable letters. I always thought that the long squiggle before the word sugar meant "confectioners sugar." But upon close examination, it seems more like "dark brown" sugar. I wouldn't have figured that out had I not noticed a space halfway through what I previously thought was a single long word.

After we got the fat and sugar nicely creamed together, it looked oddly like the beginning of a graham cracker crust. And it didn't taste beefy at all.

After the egg was nicely mixed in, we got to the one ingredient that really shows this recipe's age: a spoonful of cream. Back when this recipe was written into the back of the book, milk was not homogenized. This meant you could easily pour a little cream off the top of the bottle to go in your cookies or your mashed potatoes. 

But if you're using cream for anything today, you have to go out and buy it. Since no one wants to buy a whole carton of cream and barely use any of it, you just don't see recipes calling for the occasional spoon or splash of cream these days.

Now that our cookie batter was nice and creamy, it was time to add the flour. This resulted in a firm yet slightly sticky cookie dough. When I worked a little bit of it between my hands, it felt like the cookie recipes we clipped from the 1930s newspapers. Maybe that spoonful of cream alters the cookies just a little bit. Or maybe this was the type of cookie that people preferred in those days, cream or not.

At any rate, it was time to put the fruit into the fruit cookies. Our dates, raisins, and nuts started out as a big mound that dwarfed the as-yet-unfruited dough behind it, but completely disappeared after we mixed them in. Afterward, our cookie dough tasted like raisin-studded gingerbread.

I wasn't sure how you're supposed to shape the cookies. Should they be little balls that spread out on their own, or did we need to flatten the cookies ourselves? After all, if the dough spreads on its own, then pre-flattening it would give us sad, thin sheets of cookie paper. But if the dough doesn't spread, we would have mound-shaped cookies. I decided try both on the first batch so that at least half of the cookies would come out right.

It turns out that the fruit cookies do spread on their own, but only a little. Like peanut butter cookies, they need a bit of a starting push. Our ball cookies turned into domes, and the pre-flattened cookies turned out perfect. 

However, the 12 minute baking time written on the page was too long. The cookies weren't burnt, but they were harder than they needed to be. Also, our recipe says to bake in "a hot oven," but I think I overestimated the temperature the first time. I baked the first batch at 400°, but the cookies came out better after I lowered it to 375°.

I was a little surprised at how understated the fruit was. After all, these are called "fruit cookies." But they tasted more like spice cookies with some extra things stirred in.

Aside from a less-than-expected fruitiness, the fruit cookies were a bit underwhelming right out of the oven, but they were fantastic the next day. I'll never understand why the spices hide for a day in recipes like this. When you eat the cookie dough, it tastes deliciously spiced. But then when you bake it, the cookies taste like blandness with some molasses. But after you let the cookies sit for a day, the spices come back. We saw that happen with our Golden Treasure Pudding and also the gingerbread.

At any rate, this recipe makes a lot of cookies. And fittingly enough, they're easy to store. You can just drop them into a bag with no fear of breakage. And while they're in a bag, you can give them away. I like using cheap bags to give away food. It means the recipient cannot possibly worry about whether I want the container back.

I've noticed that a lot of our 1930s cookies seem like they're meant to sit for several days in cookie jars or other containers that don't seal as well as modern plastic ones. They tend to be sturdier than many recipes from this millennium, and also resist going stale for an impressively long time.

These cookies were delicious, and good enough to give away. (Since it's Christmastime, it's socially acceptable to give away unsolicited sweets. Any other time of the year, people look at you funny.) But these cookies weren't merely good enough to give away, they were good enough to give to people we would see again. 

It feels so nice to liberate this recipe from between the pages of a cookbook that is in an archive's protective custody and will probably never see the inside of a kitchen again. Like Elizabeth's Rolls, these cookies are too good to leave on a bookshelf.