The Raisin Cookie Mystery--Solved?

Filled raisin cookies (Photograph from "Lillian's Cupboard")

About nine years ago, I wrote about my efforts to find out more about the kind of raisin-filled cookie that my husband's mother makes for Christmas. 

Based on what I found on the Internet (which should never be a final stop for historical research), I theorized that the cookie in question was an American variation of, or an attempt to make, what the British call an Eccles cake, since Eccles cakes became popular here starting in the 19th century.  

This Christmas, it occurred to me that perhaps I should try the same approach that I used to recreate my mother's Christmas Eve cabbage soup.  I decided to look for filled raisin cookie recipes, particularly ones dating back to the 1940s, since there was a suggestion that such recipes were au courant in the U.S. around that time.  

Both raisin cookie recipes and "Eccles cake" recipes abound on the Internet.  The first thing I learned in my search is that Eccles cakes, unlike my mother-in-law's raisin cookies, are made from puff pastry--a kind of flaky, layered, butter-filled dough that plays a significant role in French cuisine.  However, my MIL's cookies use a plain dough--not puff pastry.

So I focused more intensely upon "filled raisin cookies" in my searches and, to my surprise, discovered a recipe, complete with photograph, that matches my mother-in-law's cookies quite closely.  The recipe was on a blog called Lillian's Cupboard.  The blog's author recently died, and her daughter is acting as custodian for the blog.

The recipe appears

One of my mother--in-law's raisin cookies.

here.  Lillian found it in a small, leather-bound book which housed a collection of 25 handwritten recipes, mostly for sweets and desserts.  The book was purchased in an antiques mall in Ohio, and given to Lillian as a Christmas gift.  The raisin cookie recipe, Lillian deduced, was likely from the 1940s-1950s, because:  1)  it calls for shortening, not butter; 2) it refers to "oleo", not "margarine"; 3) it specifies an exact oven temperature.  Finally, Lillian thought all the recipes in the book, including the raisin cookie recipe, were probably post-World War II because they call for lots of sugar, and wouldn't have been possible to make under the rationing regime of the war years.

There is a photograph in Lillian's post of the finished cookie; I've attached a copy above.  It looks like the cookies my mother-in-law makes, even down to the size.  (Our family raisin cookies are quite large).  The texture of the outside looks right, and the fork marks are right.  Granted, my mother-in-law uses a single large circle of dough, and folds it to one side to enclose the raisin filling, but I learned from my husband that her recipe originally called for two circles to be fork-pressed together around the entire edge.  She started using the fold-over method because it made the cookie-making process a bit faster without compromising quality.

The other jarring detail in the recipe Lillian found is the note of lemon in the cookie dough.  That is not present in the cookies my mother-in-law bakes, but since I don't have one handy to taste, I can't say for sure whether she might have substituted a different flavoring, such as vanilla extract.

I would like to find another similar recipe to see whether there is one that comes closer to my MIL's raisin cookies.  If any of my readers know of one, please let me know in the comments.

EDIT:  (1/24/2021) Added a photograph of one of my mother-in-law's raisin cookies--with a bite taken out of it to show the filling.

The Ancestor of the Raisin Cookie?

One of the types of cookies my mother-in-law always makes for Christmas is something the family calls a "raisin cookie."  These are half-circles of a sweetened dough, a little like piecrust dough in character, with a sweetened raisin filling. 

After Christmas dinner this year, my husband Googled for "raisin cookie" and was frustrated to find no real information about these cookies or, for that matter, any indication that other people were making and eating them.  He was mildly distressed at the thought that the "raisin cookie" might be dying out, and might soon no longer be made.

Today, I did some Googling of my own, using the search term "filled raisin cookie", and fared rather better than he had.  In fact, I found a number of rather similar recipes, each of which looked as though it might produce the type of raisiny goodness that my mother-in-law bakes.  Most of the recipes included a comment by the contributor to the effect that "my 80-something-year-old grandma (or mother or whatever) has baked these for many years."  (My mother-in-law is close to 80).  I found recipes from a number of sites, including allrecipes.com, BakeSpace, and grandmaskitchen, to name the ones I bothered to print out. Some of these sites had pictures of the cookies in question, and except for the shape they looked a lot like the cookies my mother-in-law bakes.  (My husband told me after I started my research, though, that his mother used to make her raisin-filled cookies round, out of two pieces of dough, but changed to her present format because it was less work to just fold over one circle.)

However, I'm not really interested in finding cookie recipes, since I'm not interested in baking. I'm interested in finding out how and where the "raisin cookie" evolved and, if possible, whether they are still being made.  The grandmaskitchen site gave me an interesting clue; it noted that the elderly female baker in question claimed that the recipe "is based on an old-fashioned British pastry called ‘Eccles cake.’" So I started Googling for the term "Eccles cake," and turned up a lot of information.

Wikipedia reports that an "Eccles cake" is named for the town of Eccles, which is in Lancashire, and it's a small round cake, made from flaky pastry and stuffed with currants and may be sprinkled with demerara sugar.  Other sites purported to give more history, tracing the Eccles cake to a shopkeeper named James Birch in the late 18th century and/or a woman named Elizabeth Raffald who published a popular cookbook in 1769 that contains a similar recipe. The Food Timeline reports both versions and notes that early versions of the Eccles cake probably contained alcohol as well as fruit. Yet another site, whose author claims to be "rather rubbish" at baking, claims that Eccles cake is an "English classic" and that it's practically required "that every Englishman (and woman) know how to make an Eccles cake."

The English angle is kind of mystifying to me.  My husband's mother's family has Scottish ancestry, but Eccles is effectively part of Manchester, which makes it definitely part of northern England, but not close enough to the Scottish border to be plausibly Scottish.  So far as I know, my husband's family doesn't have English forebears. EDIT: My husband read this post and confirmed that his family does not have English ancestry on either side.

On the other hand, one of the sites I found noted that Eccles cakes travel well, and were being exported to the young United States as early as 1818.  That suggests, to me, that there might have arisen a fashion among U.S. bakers for trying to imitate the Eccles cake, and that fashion may have given rise to cookbooks with similar recipes--one of which my mother-in-law is using.  However, the photographs of actual Eccles cakes look very different from her cookies, to me, so I don't think the case for this theory is quite proven.

I should ask my mother-in-law for her recipe, both to see how it compares to the recipes I've found on the Internet, and to have one of my husband's favorite cookie recipes handy, in case I someday want to try to bake some.

EDIT:  (12/4/2019)  Edited to correct my mother-in-law's age.  I had overestimated.