This is nostalgia in the form of a cookie – to make them, I use the 3×5 recipe note card from my Grandmother’s old metal recipe box. By 1967 my Grandfather was retired and bored, so he typed up all her recipes, using two-color typewriter ribbon. Each recipe ends with “From the kitchen of Mrs. My Grandfather’s Name”, because back then women often had no identity aside from that of the spouse.
Preheat your oven to 375 F, line a baking sheet with parchment paper or lightly grease.
Sift together 1 and 3/4 cups flour, 1 teaspoon baking soda, and ½ teaspoon salt. Set aside. Cream together 1/2 cup butter, 1/3 cup peanut butter, 1/2 cup sugar, 1/2 cup brown sugar, 1 unbeaten egg, and 1 teaspoon vanilla extract. Beat in the flour mixture.
Roll generously rounded teaspoons of dough into balls; roll the balls in some more white sugar and bake 8 minutes. Pull out the tray and place an unwrapped Hershey’s Kiss in the center of each cookie. Continue to bake another 2 to 5 minutes, until they are lightly golden and crackled. Do not over-bake these – they will harden off after you pull the tray out.
Now I know of some people who substitute a whole salted peanut for the Hershey’s Kiss, but that’s not cool. I could get behind using a small Reese’s peanut butter cup in a pinch.
Should you make these cookies? Yes! These cookies will make you incredibly popular with whomever is in your pandemic safety pod. Or you can eat them all yourself – they are just that good – enjoy!
First of all, I never realized these were called peanut blossoms! They are yummy and perfect for fall and into the holidays. That’s the season I always associate them with but I don’t know why. I’ll have to make some this weekend.
The metal recipe box AND the duotone typewriter ribbon typing flashed me right back to my childhood. My mother had a sunshine yellow plastic one. Have you scanned the cards and stored them digitally?
I have scanned nothing – maybe when I retire and am bored, should the economy ever allow for retirement?
My mother made a version of these with a poppy seed butter cookie base–but I would have much rather had this version.
Speaking of recipe boxes, I’m currently in the process of transcribing all of my grandmother’s recipes into a book for the family. The problem is that a bunch of her recipes are just lists of ingredients with zero instructions, so there’s a fair amount of trial and error involved in the process.
I’m sure your Grandmother “just knew” what each ingredient should look like. That is a lovely gift for your family.
A lot of older recipes are like that. About once a month I try to make something out of a vintage cookbook, steering clear of the aspic/gelatin/Jell-O craze that swept the nation for a good half century. If you’re very lucky you’ll get some measurements, like 1 cup Borden’s. OK, you have to know that Borden’s was a popular milk brand. But they also made cream, that was very popular, and buttermilk. Say the recipe is from 1950. You know that they weren’t talking about skim or fat-free milk. I fudge this and use half-and-half.
Also, I think things must have been a lot richer in general around 1950. The meat and poultry would have been more like organic, not the factory-farmed hormoned stuff we get. I am convinced that cans of cream of mushroom soup that show up everywhere must have been like a creamy mushroom sauce, so I make that to substitute.
So now what? “Bake.” At what temp? For how long? For that, if I can’t guess, I root around for a contemporary recipe for more or less the same thing and use that as a guide.
So far I’ve been able to lean on my own culinary/baking background as well as the memories of some of my aunts who can recall making some of these things with my grandmother. Every once in a while, though, everything comes up zeroes and I have to try and make the damned recipe to see if it comes out right. Mrs. Butcher has not been amused at some of the 1950s food that I’ve made.
Have you ever heard of this website?
This is the blog page, which has very funny stories around the recipes, and on the main page there’s a link just for recipes.
Whoops, that was linkage fail. But google-able.
Sweet–I’m going to check that out.
This is a classic cookie. What sort of psychopath replaces the Hershey kiss with a PEANUT?
Georgia peanut farmers? And I mean no disrespect to President Carter, who just turned 96!
Apparently Keitel’s psychopathic Grandmother. Which I had not realized until after I had written the post. Oops!
The same Grandmother that made milky rice pudding and iced tea that consisted of one gallon water, nine tea bags, and a cup and a half of sugar. I thought I had a nice childhood.
When I make rice pudding at the Blacksmith household I make it as a pudding, scoop out 1/4 of it for me, and then add double the volume of milk and stir it to the consistency of a cream soup. Because that is how Keitel likes it. I am a good wife.
You’re a better woman than most.
Sorry Keitel 😖
These fall solidly in the ‘holiday cookie’ category for me.
It never actually occurred to me I could make them another time of year, and frankly it’s brilliant.