We are scanning old documents here in the Alumni Association office, and as we had a request for the famous “No Bake Peanut Butter Cookies”, we decided to upload this recipe first!
I met with Mrs. Edna Palmer several years ago, when she gave me several original recipe cards from her collection, including the peanut butter cookies. I am not sure if the original cafeteria lady, Mrs. Janie Grice, devised this recipe or if it was Mrs. Palmer’s creation, but Mrs. Palmer had it in her cookbook and gave me permission to share it with alumni.
There are actually a couple versions of these cookies in the recipes she gave me. It turns out Mrs. Palmer had asked someone to cut the peanut butter cookies down to a normal serving size, but when I published that reformulation in the Spring 2007 issue of Mustang Memories, I received many complaints that it didn’t work.
A culinary arts student very kindly recalculated it for me and I published the new version in the Fall 2008 issue.
But this recipe… this is the version she used to feed the entire school. Take a look:
It doesn’t give a baking temperature or a time to bake it; none of the recipe cards have this information. Our cafeteria ladies knew what they were doing — probably knew exactly how long to bake this stuff and how high to turn the temp dial — what obviously were important and needed to be written down were the ingredients.