"Hindus"

Me: "Look, there's a recipe for cookies called Hindus."

E.: "That's not racist or anything."

There's no use sugar coating it.  Someone named these cookies "Hindus" because they contain both chocolate and molasses and are, if you will, dark-complexioned cookies.

Oh the hilarity.

The recipe comes from the Rumford Common Sense Cook Book, compiled by Lily Haxworth Wallace.  The 64-page book is undated, but various folks on the web think that it was published in about 1930.  Based in Rumford, Rhode Island, the Rumford Chemical Works produced the cookbook in order to promote its Rumford Baking Power.

(The Clabber Girl Corporation continues to make Rumford Baking Powder, although not in Rhode Island.  Before I get a disgruntled note from the Clabber Girl and her legal team, let's make it clear that there is absolutely no reason to think that the company promotes racist cookie recipes or endorses any racist uses for baking powder today.)

If this book does in fact date to 1930, it might be that the "Hindus" are reflective of 1920s-era American attitudes towards people from India. Not only was the Indian independence movement in the news, so too was U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind, a 1923 Supreme Court decision that excluded Indians from U.S. citizenship due to reasons of race.

Historically, U.S. citizenship had a lot to do with race.  The 1790 Naturalization Act limited U.S. citizenship to free, white persons. The Treaty of Guadalupe-Hildalgo not only ended the Mexican-American War, it also declared that Mexicans could be U.S. citizens.  That was true even if by the early twentieth century many "Anglos" in the Southwest tried to get around the fact that Mexican-Americans were not just citizens but also legally white.  The Fourteenth Amendment rendered Americans of African descent U.S. citizens.  The 1870 Naturalization Act allowed African aliens to become citizens.  Yet it also opened the possibility that all Asians could be excluded from U.S. citizenship.  Later, in 1882, the U.S. Congress barred all but a small segment of the Chinese from entering the United States, and it renewed that restriction in 1892 and 1902. Not until 1943 were Chinese persons allowed to apply for U.S. citizenship.

If you're wondering, Native Americans did not receive full U.S. citizenship rights until 1924. 

But if in 1923 blacks, whites, and Mexicans were eligible for U.S. citizenship, and the Chinese ineligible, what did that mean for Asians from places such as India?  Were they barred from becoming naturalized citizens?

In 1923, Bhagat Singh Thind, a Punjabi Sikh who lived in Oregon, put that question to a test.  He didn't challenge the racism underlying citizenship law.  Instead, Thind claimed that he was eligibile for U.S. citizenship because he was, indeed, white.  He was white, because he was from Northern India, a region settled by "Aryans."  If he was "Aryan," Thind argued, he was white and, therefore, eligible for U.S. citizenship.  The Supreme Court disagreed: Asian Indians were neither white nor permitted to become U.S. citizens. 

Is it a coincidence that less than a decade after the Thind decision there appeared a recipe for dark-colored, decidedly non-white cookies called "Hindus"?

I'm not shocked to find that one of my great-grandmother's old cookbooks has a racist recipe.  What surprises me is that the author correctly spelled Hindus. You'd think she would have gone with "Hindoos," which is far more derogatory.  It's almost as though she was trying not to be racist.

Was she?  We could also imagine that, while the cookies are racist because they are a play on skin color, they were inspired by the Indian independence movement of the 1920s.  Gandhi, a Hindu, gained world-wide fame in the 1920s for his commitment to non-violence and his leadership in the fight to end British rule in India.

These are some very serious cookies.

But not everything in the 1920s was so sternly different from today. The Rumford Common Sense Cook Book contains other, humorous, non-racist gems.  For example, it would be a terrible shame if I fail to make the Corn Flake Cookies.

Then there is the fantastic advice on school lunches.  What kid wouldn't want mashed baked beans with mayonnaise or chili sauce?  Of course, I used to eat chow mein sandwiches, so what do I know?  I certainly was unaware that: "Boys like plain folding lunch boxes, girls prefer daintiness of equipment."

Feel free to study this page yourselves.

For the record, I assume that the Spanish Meat Loaf is racism-free.  It contains pimientos, which are Spanish.  That one's legit.  Although, only someone lacking common sense would ask for this meatloaf in Spain.

Even if these recipes are probably not something you'd likely Google in preparation for your next meal, they might be worth trying. The "Hindus" were delicious. No, they were the best cookies I've ever made.

The batter was light and fluffy.  Forget about baking, I could have served it in a tall glass and called it dessert.  It was like a fine mousse.  So, seeing as I'm not going to serve "Hindus" to my friends, I've decided to change the name from "Hindus" to Mousse Melts.

E. agreed with me.  "That's far less racist," he said.

Less?  I was going for not racist at all.

Hermits

I grew up eating hermits all the time, because my father really likes them. No one else I knew ever ate these spiced raisin cookies though. They're still around, but they are by no means something that I see everyday. This recipe was one of the many my great-aunt collected or received from friends. Perhaps a friend named Helen Alexander gave it to her.


They're simple treats, and yet it seems that no one really has them figured out. Many believe that hermits probably originated in the New England region. One interested blogger out of Boston named Lady Gouda thinks of them as bars rather than as cookies. I can see that. Another notes that they were especially popular during the Great Depression. That makes sense, since molasses would have been cheaper than sugar.

My father didn't grow up during the Depression, but both of his parents served as social workers helping people to make it through that hard time in the city of Fall River, Massachusetts. I may not know where hermits come from exactly, but I do know that my grandfather introduced them to my father.

Or maybe their living in New England predisposed them to this molasses cookie. According to the authors of America's Founding Food: The Story of New England Cooking, beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing through the first decades of the twentieth century, New England cooks overwhelming preferred molasses to sugar regardless of costs. Sensing that Yankee identity and New England's influence in the nation were waning, female cooks and cookbook writers looked to molasses and its historical ties to New England as a means to managing the blows to their identity. Perhaps molasses helped to foster the popularity of hermits in region.

I guess the Yankee identity crisis had subsided by the time my great aunt received this recipe, because it does not contain molasses. The hermits that my father and I have enjoyed were much darker in color than than the ones that I made from my great aunt's recipe. That's probably due to the lack of molasses and to the fact that I only had light brown sugar on hand.


Most recipes for hermits require molasses, and some, but not all, list brown sugar as an ingredient. So, this recipe is unique or unusual in that it calls only for brown sugar. Coffee is also not a standard ingredient, but there are many hermits recipes out there, including one that claims to be Pennsylvania Dutch in origin, that use coffee.

New England. Pennsylvania. No one knows where these simple, little cookies or bars began.

Nevertheless, the person who penned "delicious" on the recipe before putting it through the ditto machine was right. These hermits are really good. They may not have molasses, but even with the first bite there was no mistaking Helen Alexander's recipe for anything other than hermits.

And who was Helen Alexander? Well, what I know about her makes my knowledge of hermits look encyclopedic.

Ginger Creams

I love making a hit with men! But who knew I could do that with so little sugar or shortening?

This recipe (click on the image to enlarge it) comes from a World War II-era Betty Crocker flier that I found along with the 1908 Lowney’s Cookbook. The small celebration of how little sugar and shortening it takes to make these cookies likely stemmed from the 1942 Food Rationing Program. Sugar rationing began in 1943, which probably means this recipe was published in that year or in 1944.

Butter rationing must have had practical results when it came to sending cookies to distant lands. Less butter in a cookie makes it ideal for shipping overseas. The more fat there is in a baked good, the more quickly it hardens. These pillowy ginger creams, with only one quarter of a cup (!) of butter across four-dozen cookies, likely arrived in the hands of soldiers in Europe or the Pacific still light and fluffy.

Send these to someone you know in the military. Make a hit with men and women! Or, do what I did. I sent them to my old office and made a hit with dieters.