Great Aunt Edna's Oatmeal Cookies

My mother Verna made these oatmeal cookies quite often in our house, as did her mother before her. In the "Leonard Family Tales" Mom said Nana spent a lot of time in the kitchen. She said, "My mother made innumerable sweets. My father had a sweet tooth and he ate dessert every mealtime, and candy during the evening. He would eat chocolates - in fact, half a box of chocolates - every evening, and then he would have an evening snack of milk and some kind of sweets."

Nana and Poppy left the family home on St Peter's Rd and moved to a nursing home called "The Cove" when my cousin James was an infant. Pop would have been having a "day out" in this photo with James at the bungalow (what they call a cottage in Cape Breton). Pop died in 1981 when James would have been three so this might have been his last summer visiting with my cousins from California. I can imagine Pop eating these oatmeal cookies with a cold glass of milk in the evening.

Oatmeal Cookies

Preheat oven to 400°F
(hot oven)

Ingredients:

1 cup butter and shortening

1 cup brown sugar
2 scant cups oatmeal
2 scant cups All Purpose flour
¼ tsp cream of tartar
1 tsp baking soda
4 tbsp water
¼ tsp salt
1 tsp vanilla

Instructions:

Melt butter and shortening. Cream together butter and sugar. Dissolve baking soda in water and add vanilla, then add mixture to the dough. Stir together dry ingredients and add. Mix well. (The dough can be refrigerated at this point to make handling easier, or saved to bake later.) Use a teaspoon to scoop out dough and form balls the size of walnuts. Place two inches apart on ungreased cookie sheets (parchment paper makes clean-up easy and is compostable). Spread them very thin with a fork dipped in cold water. Bake 8-10 minutes (depending on the thickness) until the edges brown, and remove. Make sure the cookie doesn’t look raw in the centre. Cool for a few minutes on the cookie sheet and then transfer to cooling racks to finish cooling.

 

Note: I refrigerated the dough before baking these cookies so they didn't flatten as much as they would have if they had been cooked right away.

Nana’s blue recipe card credits Edna Farquhar for this recipe. This Edna was our Poppy’s (Charles Edwin Leonard) sister, so she was "Aunt Edna" to Verna, Harry, Walter and Edna Leonard.

Baking Tips:

Measuring brown sugar

When you measure brown sugar the recipes usually call for “packed” brown sugar, even if it's not indicated in the instructions. To “pack” brown sugar, use a spoon to scoop a small amount of brown sugar into the measuring cup and press down with the spoon. Add more and press again. Continue until the measuring cup is full.

Various measurements of a cup
A "scant cup" is a cup minus one or two teaspoons. A "heaping cup" is a cup with an additional one or two teaspoons. For liquids it's referred to as a "generous cup." Liquids are best measured in a clear measuring cup with a spout. Dry ingredients are measure in a measuring cup without a spout.