- With the price of eggs surging, eggless recipes and egg substitutes are in demand.
- I tried baking "poor man's cookies," a vintage recipe that has no eggs or dairy.
- They didn't come out perfectly, but they were delicious.
It's official: Eggs are more expensive than they've ever been, and it's not only because of the bird flu.
Like many other people, I've been trying to cut back on my egg consumption, and I need all the help I can get.
In times of crises (egg-related or otherwise), it can be helpful to turn to the past and see how our elders overcame similar problems. Almost 100 years ago, people were handling egg and dairy shortages during the Great Depression by getting creative.
Enter: poor man's cookies.
I found this recipe while searching for dairy-free and egg-free recipes. Like "Depression cake," this cookie recipe was developed in the '30s when the average family had limited access to ingredients.
I followed two recipes I found online; one came from Taste of Home, which called the recipe "vintage," and the second from the blog Gluesticks, which credited "an old edition of Country Magazine" for the recipe.
The tasty cookies were easy to make, although I did have to purchase a few ingredients that the average home baker may not have in their pantry.
Here's what it was like to bake "poor man's cookies."
The recipe called for typical baking ingredients, such as sugar, flour, and baking soda, but no eggs.
The recipes I followed called for:
- 3/4 cup shortening
- 1 cup packed brown sugar
- 1/2 cup sugar
- 1/4 cup water
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1 cup all-purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/4 teaspoons salt
- 2 cups rolled oats
The first step was to combine brown sugar, white sugar, and shortening.
One of the items I needed to purchase for this recipe was the shortening.
Full disclosure: I didn't know what shortening was, exactly, until I baked these cookies. I learned it's essentially a butter substitute that's all fat and considerably more shelf-stable than butter.
I used Crisco All-Vegetable Shortening, which was $5.76 for a 16-ounce can at Fairway. For this recipe, I used ¾ cup.
I used my KitchenAid hand mixer to cream the three ingredients.
I received a KitchenAid hand mixer, which retails at $79.99, as a holiday present a few years ago — it's the best hand mixer I've tried, and I'm thankful for it any time I bake.
The next step was combining the dry ingredients.
That means the flour, baking soda, and salt.
After I combined the dry ingredients with the mix, I slowly beat in the water and vanilla extract.
As you can see, it began to splatter a bit against my fridge. I probably could've poured the water in slower or reduced the mixer's speed.
I went off-book and added a teaspoon of cinnamon.
Though it wasn't in the recipe, I decided to add a teaspoon of cinnamon to give the cookies a little extra flavor.
I love cinnamon and brown sugar in my oatmeal, so I figured that adding cinnamon to oatmeal cookies couldn't hurt.
The final step was to fold in 2 cups of rolled oats.
Rolled oats were the other ingredient I had to purchase. I bought a 32-ounce bag of Bob's Red Mill oats from Fairway for $6.65.
I had to use my hands to make sure the oats were evenly distributed.
In the process, I almost entirely covered my hands in dough. Since there's no eggs in this, I was safe to take a little taste of the unbaked dough, and was pleased.
I was expecting this to be on the dryer side, since there was no eggs or butter to add moisture, but the water, shortening, and creamed sugar made this similar to any other cookie dough I've made in the past.
I had enough dough to fill two greased trays.
I had already preheated the oven to 350 degrees.
After a few minutes, I checked on the cookies and couldn't believe how they had already expanded.
As you can see, the cookies spread out quite quickly, and quite widely. The sheet on the bottom combined almost instantly to become one giant mega-cookie.
After 13 minutes, I took the trays out to mixed results.
The top tray came out perfectly — the cookies were golden-brown around the edges, and they were touching, but not congealed together.
The bottom tray, on the other hand, was a lost cause. They were burnt around the edges, brittle, and resembled oatmeal bark more than oatmeal cookies.
However, the top tray tasted great.
This was one of the best oatmeal cookies I've had in a long time.
The cookies were neither too chewy nor dry, and they were just the right amount of sweet. I'm glad I added the cinnamon, as that gave it a subtle burst of flavor, but I'm sure these would've been fine without them. I didn't miss eggs (or any other dairy products) at all.
Next time, I'll be using smaller scoops of dough and sticking to the top rack of my oven. I might experiment by adding chocolate chips, but there aren't any other changes I'd make — and now that I have the ingredients, "poor man's cookies" will be a quick and cheap snack to bake.
