It’s hard to believe that shopping at the mall was so significant in the 1980s. I attended high school on the north shore of Lake Tahoe. While there were a few boutiques in town, it definitely wasn’t where my sisters and I wanted to shop. We received a monthly clothing allowance, and once a month my mother drove us to the two malls in Reno.
Every mall at that time had a Mrs. Field’s Cookies shop. I was too cheap to spend my money there, but my mom bought us a cookie once or twice. I do recall how good they smelled. That was hard to miss. And shortly after these stores opened up, copycat recipes for Mrs. Field’s cookies were all the rage. I had a few myself. I still have the one for oatmeal butterscotch cookies, but I almost never make them. Those butterscotch chips are full of questionable ingredients. (But yes, the cookies are quite tasty.)
Wikipedia attributes the following recipe to a chain letter from the mid-1980s. Of course, no one would sell a recipe that’s the foundation for a successful franchise operation. But the recipe does make respectable cookies. I thought reading the letter could take you back in time. I liked the 80s.
“I would like to share with you this recipe which has an interesting story behind it. A friend of a friend of mine bought some Mrs. Fields’ cookies and was told that the recipe was available for “two-fifty.” She thought $2.50 was a bit expensive for a recipe; but because she liked the cookies so much, she told the clerk to charge the recipe to her account.
Later, she looked at her bill and discovered she was charged $250.00 for the recipe. Failing to get the store to remove the charge from her account, since they said she already had the recipe in her possession and could have copied it, she proceeded to share the recipe with everyone and anyone. The cookies have a different taste that Toll House Cookies and everyone who has tasted them has raved about them. Hope you enjoy them.”
Mrs. Fields’ Cookies
Cream together:
1 cup butter
1 cup sugar
1 cup brown sugar
Add:
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Mix together (separate bowl)
2 cups flour
2 ½ cups oatmeal (put small amounts in blender after measuring until it turns to powder
½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
Mix together all ingredients and add:
12-ounce bag chocolate chips
½ of an 8-ounce plain Hershey bar, finely grated
1 ½ cups chopped nuts (any kind)
Make golf-ball sized cookies and place 2” apart on an ungreased cookie sheet. Bake at 375°F for 6 minutes. Makes 56 cookies.
“THESE COOKIES SELL FOR $7.95 DOZ.”
That’s the recipe as I came across it. I would not substitute coconut oil for the butter in here, not if you want to really remember what those cookies tasted like. One tweak I would add in is the practice of using a drinking class to make the cookies round after baking. Something I saw on Facebook: Invert a wide mouth drinking glass or cookie cutter over each cookie while they are still warm from the oven. Gently move the glass in a circular motion around edges of the cookie, slightly pushing in to make the cookie round.[1] No more misshapen cookies!
Chef's review: Ellie was visiting for a few days and whipped these up, following the recipe exactly. (Oops, not quite. She substituted a Baker's chocolate bar for the Hershey's, since the latter now contains the questionable PGPR as an ingredient.) She was quite relieved not to have to use beans for anything. Anyway, she felt they were a lot of extra work, a waste of chocolate chips, since she used the full bag and not the half bag that almost all of us do.
Family reviews: With the oats and nuts, Doc and Buttercup said they tasted healthier. Everyone said they tasted fine, but there were too many chocolate chips. And nobody liked them better than our regular recipe.
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