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Drop Ginger Cakes
One cup sugar, two-thirds cup molasses, one-half cup sweet milk, one-half cup hot water, twelve tablespoons shortening, two teaspoons soda, one teaspoon pulverized alum, one tablespoon ginger; stir about as stiff as pound cake, set it on ice for one or two hours, drop from a small tablespoon on pans a little distance from each other and bake quickly. Take one-half of the hot water to dissolve the alum in and the other half for the soda, a little salt. If preferred, these cakes may be rolled and cut out with the cake cutter. They are very nice.
A soft molasses-ginger drop cookie from an era when cooks were trusted to judge flour by feel. The two things to settle before you start are the missing flour and the alum.
- No flour is listedThe instruction "stir about as stiff as pound cake" is the only guide, which assumed a cook who knew the batter. Expect somewhere around 4 to 4 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour for this quantity of liquid and fat; add it gradually and stop when the dough holds a soft mound on the spoon.
- Alum as leaveningPulverized alum here is potash alum (potassium aluminum sulfate), the acid half of an old-fashioned leavening pair, working against the soda much as cream of tartar or sour milk would. It is still sold as food-grade pickling alum, but it carries a faint astringency; cream of tartar in place of the alum, or baking powder in place of both leaveners, gives a cleaner flavour, though the amounts have to be arrived at by trial rather than by direct substitution.
- Twelve tablespoons shorteningThat is 3/4 cup. Lard or a solid vegetable shortening is closest to the original; butter works and tastes better, though the cakes will spread a little more.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh whole milk, named to distinguish it from the sour or buttermilk that older recipes called for as an acid.
- Bake quicklyThe recipe says only "bake quickly," which in period terms points to a hot oven, somewhere in the region of 400 to 425F. These are small, sugary and molasses-heavy, so watch them closely; 8 to 10 minutes is usually enough, and they should come out while the centers still look slightly underset.
- The chilling is not optionalOne to two hours cold is what makes a batter this soft droppable, and it is also what lets you roll and cut the dough as the note suggests. Warm dough will run together on the sheet.
- Dissolving the leaveners separatelySplitting the half cup of hot water so the alum and the soda each get their own portion keeps them from fizzing out in the cup. Add both to the batter near the end and get the pans into the oven promptly.
- YieldRoughly four to five dozen small cakes from a tablespoon drop. They keep several days in a tin and soften as they sit.
Alum-and-soda leavening belongs to a particular window in American baking, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, when commercial baking powders were still expensive and inconsistent and some cooks assembled their own acid-plus-alkali combinations at the mixing bowl. What faded was the home cook's own alum-and-soda mixing; aluminium-salt baking powders, made with sodium aluminium sulfate, remained in commercial use long afterward and still are. Alum was cheap, sold by druggists for pickling and for setting dyes, and it appeared in a good many household recipes as well as in the cut-rate baking powders that food reformers spent decades attacking. Soft molasses drop cakes like these were standard supper-table and lunch-pail fare: dark, keeping well, and sweetened largely by molasses at a time when it generally cost less than refined sugar, though the margin varied a good deal by decade. The closing line, "They are very nice," reads as the sort of plain endorsement that may suggest a recipe contributed by a household cook rather than written by a professional.