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| Not the most practical packaging for gifting. Image from EasyBaked |
Christmas will be here soon, and that means parties to attend and gifts to give to family that you don't know (or like) as well as you should. I submit to you that a tin of chocolate chip cookies is the answer for both of these problems. They are delicious, they won't end up in the back of a closet, a large quantity can be made for very little money, and they really aren't that difficult.
Having decided that cookies are the answer to your Christmas gift stress, you now have to decide which cookie recipe you want to follow. If you google "chocolate chip cookie recipe" you will get more than 6 million results. How are you to choose?
I will be making my family's oatmeal chocolate chip recipe. My great grandmother clipped it out of a magazine in the 1940s and pasted it, with a few changes, to a recipe card. It's been a family treasure ever since. I'm not about to share it with you. Sorry.
What I will share with you are two recipes that are close, and make very good cookies (I've tried them). But before I get to that I wanted to talk about the major difference you'll see between the more vintage recipe and the modern one. (The vintage one is the original recipe my great grandmother modified.)
Most modern recipes call for butter. The recipes from the 1940s tended to call for shortening (or occasionally margarine). Do you know why? World war II. Margarine was first invented in the 1810s; it was intended as a cheap shelf stable substitute for butter for soldiers and poor people. Initially it was made out of beef tallow (lard, but from cows instead of pigs) and skim milk. It was made by suspending droplets of saturated fat in liquid; the fat had to be saturated, because only saturated fats are solid at room temperature. By the 1870s food chemists had discovered that they could substitute some of the beef tallow with vegetable oil (by the 1940s 100% vegetable fat margarine had been developed). As the depression hit the US in the 1930s more and more families switched from butter to margarine due to cost. Then WWII resulted in rationing of several food staples, including butter (and other fats, meats, sugar, coffee, and consumer goods like pantyhose). In 1943, on an average week, butter would cost twice as many ration points as other fats due to differences in supply. However, many weeks there just wasn't any butter for sale at any price. By the spring of 1944 the government decided that lard and shortening did not need to be rationed; domestic production was sufficient to meet consumer needs and have enough for manufacturing (fats were used to make explosives) and feeding soldiers. The net result of all this was that most families switched away from expensive and hard-to-get butter and instead used margarine, shortening, or lard. This is reflected in the baking recipes of the time.
As the depression and WWII moved further into the past, butter became more popular as the fat for making cookies. Butter is delicious, with a rich flavor that other fats can't do justice to (not that they haven't tried). This switch changed both the flavor and the texture of the predominant cookie recipes. The change in texture is due to the chemical differences between butter and shortening (and margarine, but I'm not going to get into that because there's variation between different margarines).
Shortening is made from vegetable oil. The oil is hydrogenated. This is a chemical reaction that converts unsaturated fats into saturated ones. In the simplest sense the reaction is H2C=CH2 + H2 --> H3C-CH3.These new saturated fats are solid at room temperature. Fully hydrogenated vegetable oil (shortening) should not contain any trans fats. Trans fats are the result of partial hydrogenation, where only some double bonds are removed. See more here. Shortening also does not contain any water (or anything else). This is the major distinction between it and butter when baking.
Butter is a mixture of fat, butter solids, and water. Most butter is 80-85% fat and about 1% butter solids; the rest of the butter is just water. European brands tend to be closer to 85% fat, while American butters are around 80%. This water isn't "bad", but it does have important effects on baked goods. A recipe that calls for 100g (about 7T) of shortening is asking for 100g of fat, but a recipe that calls for 100g of butter is calling for 80g (5.5T) of fat and 20g (1.5T) of water.
When you bake cookies made from butter, that water will heat up and boil. This will contribute to the amount of leavening in the final cookie. Butter also has a lower melting point than shortening (this has to do with the specific fatty acids in each more than with the water content), this causes the dough to soften in the oven more quickly than it would if it contained shortening. These two traits lead to cookies that spread easily and puff beyond their structural capacity because they spread and puff before the eggs cook. Final result? Flatter, crisper cookies (with a lovely butter flavor). Nothing wrong with that.
When you bake cookies made from shortening there is no water. The only leavening will come from the baking powder/soda you added. Also the higher melting point will keep the dough firmer longer after going in the oven. Seemingly paradoxically, this means that shortening cookies will spread less and puff more, compared to their buttery cousins. This is because less leavening and more structural stability means that the cookies hold their lift without collapsing. This leaves you with fatter more tender cookies. Delicious! But without the buttery goodness, shortening based recipes need to be more carefully balanced with their sugar and spices. They have a "cleaner" taste and are susceptible to tasting like a spoonful of brown sugar. But maybe you'd like that. I will keep my judgements to myself.
Vintage Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe
Makes 7 dozen cookies1 cup shortening
3/4 cup light brown sugar
3/4 cup white sugar
2 eggs
1.5 cups sifted AP flour (about 6oz by weight)
1t baking soda
1t salt
1t vanilla
2 cups quick cook rolled oats
2 cup chocolate chips*
New Toll House Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe
Makes 7 dozen cookies1 cup butter
1/2 cup light brown sugar
1 cup white sugar
2 eggs
1.5 cups sifted AP flour (about 6oz by weight)
1t baking soda
1t salt
1t vanilla
1t hot water
2 cups quick cook rolled oats
12oz chocolate chips (about 2 cups)*
*The two cups can be all chips, or any combination of chips, raisins, dried cranberries, and nuts that adds up to 2 cups. Oatmeal raisin is classic. Pecan and chocolate chip is popular in my family. Dark chocolate cranberry is delicious and a little more sophisticated. Do what sounds good to you.
Instructions (for both recipes)
Preheat oven to 350/375F. Cream shortening/butter and sugars until light and fluffy. Add eggs, vanilla, and water; beat well. Sift in flour, soda, and salt. Mix well. Add oats and chips. Mix to combine.Line a cookie sheet with parchment. Use a small disher (about 1" diameter) or two teaspoons to drop dough onto sheet. Yes, these are small cookies. Space cookies at least 1.5" apart. Bake for 12/8 minutes or until the edges are just slightly darker than the center.
Once out of the oven, allow the cookies to firm up for 5 minutes before trying to take them off the tray. Move them to a towel spread out on a table to finish cooling. Once cool, pack the cookies into tins for gifting. If you want tender cookies to stay tender, put a slice of cheap white bread in the tin with the cookies; it helps maintain ideal humidity and keep the cookies soft for a few more days. Or just keep the cookies in a zip bag with most of the air removed. What did I tell you? Not too hard at all!
Want some pictures to help you know when the cookies are done? Check out my post here!
A note about cost
I said this was cheap. I mean it and I'll prove it. I bought the supplies for cookies for 10 people (4 batches of cookies, about 30 cookies per person). Costs were as follows...$14.90 for 5 pairs of plastic cookie "tins" from Walmart ($2.98/pair)
$8.00 for 4 12oz bags of Nestle chocolate chips from Kroger (on sale for $2.00/ea)
$2.28 for a large tub of quick oats
$0.54 for a box of baking soda
$1.68 for 5lbs of AP flour
$6.96 for 40oz (6 cups) of shortening (I was spendy and bought the baking sticks)
$1.54 for 2lbs of brown sugar
$2.99 for a box of parchment popups from Kroger
$4.48 for 10lbs of white sugar
$2.74 for 2oz of pure vanilla extract
+$1.25 for 12 eggs
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$47.36 for 10 people
assuming you had to buy everything (I had to look some prices up because I keep sugar, vanilla, flour, eggs, and baking soda in the house). For just $4 more (so $51) you could make 6 batches of cookies, you just need more chocolate. Though I think you'd need more/bigger cookie tins...or to just eat the other 150 cookies yourself O: )
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