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Oat Meal Cookies
One-half a cup of butter, half a cup of sugar (brown,) half a cup of molasses, one cup of fine oat meal, half a teaspoon of soda in half a cup of boiling water, one egg, half a tablespoonful of ginger, a little salt, flour enough to make a stiff batter. Spread thin on long tins and cut in squares after they are baked.
A molasses-ginger bar cookie baked as one thin sheet and cut into squares, which is faster than dropping rounds and was the usual way of handling a sticky oat dough. Two things in the original need decisions made for you: what "fine oat meal" is, and how much flour "enough" means.
- Fine oat mealThis is oats ground to a meal, not modern rolled or quick oats. Use oat flour, or pulse rolled oats in a food processor until sandy; whole rolled oats will give a much drier, looser bar than intended.
- Flour enoughGenuinely ambiguous. With half a cup each of butter, sugar and molasses plus a cup of oat meal, expect roughly 1 to 1 1/2 cups of flour — stop when the dough holds a mound on the spoon but can still be pushed flat with an offset spatula.
- Soda in boiling waterDissolving the soda in hot water before adding it was standard practice with molasses batters; it distributes evenly and starts reacting with the molasses acid at once. Mix it in last and get the sheet into the oven promptly.
- OvenNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, 350F, suits this; a thin sheet takes about 12 to 15 minutes and is done when the surface springs back and the edges pull from the tin.
- Long tinsLong, shallow baking tins, greased or lined with parchment; the batter will not fill a large sheet pan, so use what it covers. Spread the dough about 1/4 inch thick — thinner than feels right — since it puffs and spreads as the soda works.
- CuttingScore and cut while the sheet is still warm. A thin molasses sheet firms up considerably as it cools and can crack rather than cut cleanly once cold.
- GingerHalf a tablespoon is about 1 1/2 teaspoons of ground ginger, a firm but not startling amount for the quantity of dough. Older ground ginger loses its heat; taste yours before committing.
- YieldSeveral dozen two-inch squares, depending on how far the batter spreads. They keep well in a tin for a week and firm up as they sit.
Oats moved from porridge to baking in American home cooking during the last decades of the nineteenth century, as commercially rolled and ground oats became cheap and widely sold in packages rather than scooped from a barrel — the Quaker mills of Ohio are usually credited with pushing the grain into general household use. Recipes like this one show the transition mid-stride: the oats are still "fine oat meal," a ground product close to what a Scottish porridge cook would recognize, rather than the flaked oats that would define the twentieth-century oatmeal cookie. The flavoring is older still, molasses and ginger being the standard sweet-spice pairing of the American cookie tin long before butter-and-vanilla took over. Baking the dough as one thin sheet and cutting squares was a practical economy: one pan, one bake, and a tin of hard-keeping cookies to set out with tea.