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Ginger Crisps
Cream 1/2 cup Crisco with 1/2 cup sugar, add 1 cup molasses, 1 teaspoon each of cinnamon and nutmeg, 1 teaspoon salt, 2 teaspoons baking powder, and flour to make stiffish dough. Roll thin, cut out with cutter and bake in quick oven.
A molasses rolled cookie from one of the early Crisco promotional books, written for cooks who were expected to judge dough by feel. Two things need pinning down before you start: the flour quantity and the oven.
- The missing gingerDespite the name, no ginger appears in the ingredient list — only cinnamon and nutmeg. Either the original omitted it in error or the "ginger" refers loosely to the molasses spice character. Add 1 to 2 teaspoons ground ginger if you want the cookie the title promises.
- Flour to make stiffish doughExpect roughly 3 to 3 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour for this quantity of fat, sugar and molasses. Add it in stages and stop when the dough holds together firmly and no longer sticks to the bowl; too much makes the crisps hard rather than snappy.
- CriscoStraight vegetable shortening, still sold and still functional here. Modern Crisco is reformulated without partially hydrogenated oil but behaves the same in a rolled cookie. Butter works but spreads more and browns faster.
- Quick ovenPeriod sources place a "quick oven" somewhere around 400–425°F, but the term was never fixed and varied from book to book. Whatever the number, molasses scorches fast; for most home ovens, 375°F for 7 to 9 minutes gives a crisp cookie without bitter edges.
- Baking powder with molassesTwo teaspoons of baking powder is a lot, and molasses is acidic enough that many contemporary versions used soda instead. The powder will still lift; the dough will be softer and puffier than a soda-leavened snap.
- SaltA full teaspoon is more than a modern cookie dough of this size would carry, and Crisco is unsalted. Half a teaspoon of fine table salt suits modern taste.
- Chill before rollingThe dough is slack when freshly mixed. An hour in the refrigerator makes it possible to roll to 1/8 inch and lift the cut shapes cleanly.
- YieldDepends entirely on thickness and cutter size; rolled thin and cut small, this quantity makes a very large batch. They crisp as they cool, so pull them while the centres still look slightly soft.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a well-established genre: the cookbook published by a manufacturer to teach cooks what to do with a product. Crisco was introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911 as a hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening, positioned as a cleaner, more economical stand-in for lard and butter, and the company commissioned recipe books whose formulas called for it by name. That is why a plain molasses rolled cookie — a thing American households had been making with lard or drippings for a century — appears here with "Crisco" written into the first line rather than "shortening." The cookie itself is an old form: thin, spiced, molasses-sweetened and rolled with a cutter, closely related to the ginger snaps and "crisps" that turn up throughout nineteenth-century American manuscript collections, where molasses was cheaper than sugar and did double duty as sweetener and colour. The filing of this recipe under "Eggs" is almost certainly an artifact of the book's organisation rather than anything to do with the dough, which contains none.