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Best Ginger-Drops
Half cup sugar, a cup molasses, half cup butter, one tea-spoon each cinnamon, ginger and cloves, two tea-spoons soda in a cup boiling water, two and a half cups flour; add two well-beaten eggs the last thing before baking. Baked in gem-tins or as a common ginger-bread, and eaten warm with a sauce, they make a nice dessert.-Mrs. C. Hawks, Goshen, Ind.
A soft, pourable molasses batter rather than a rolled ginger cookie — despite the name, these are closer to little steamed-textured cakes. Two details govern the outcome: the soda is dissolved in boiling water and the eggs go in at the very last moment.
- Gem-tinsGem pans were small cast-iron muffin pans, in sizes at or a little below a modern standard muffin cup. A well-greased 12-cup muffin tin is the nearest equivalent; expect this quantity to fill a dozen cups or more.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because the book assumes a wood range. Bake at 350F, 15 to 18 minutes for muffin-sized drops, or 25 to 30 minutes for a single 8-inch square pan of "common ginger-bread."
- The sodaTwo teaspoons of soda dissolved in a cup of boiling water is the leavening and also the liquid — there is no milk in this batter. The hot water blooms the soda against the acidic molasses, so mix and bake without delay once it is in.
- Eggs lastThe recipe gives no reason for adding the beaten eggs "the last thing before baking," but beaten eggs stirred in at the end bring air to a batter whose soda has already begun to work, and the instruction is consistent with getting the pans filled and into the oven quickly.
- MolassesUse unsulphured dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is far more bitter than what a 1870s kitchen meant by molasses. Light or "mild" molasses gives a paler, sweeter drop.
- ButterHalf a cup is 4 ounces, one stick. Butter of the period was commonly salted for keeping; if using unsalted, a quarter teaspoon of salt is worth adding, as the recipe calls for none.
- Batter consistencyTwo and a half cups of flour against a cup of boiling water plus molasses gives a batter that pours rather than drops. That is correct — do not stiffen it with extra flour or the crumb turns dry and tough.
- The sauce"A sauce" here means a sweet pudding sauce: a simple hard sauce of creamed butter and sugar, or a thin lemon or vanilla sauce thickened with a little cornstarch. Serve the drops warm, as the recipe insists.
Buckeye Cookery (first published in Ohio in 1876 as Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping) gives considerable attention to ginger-bread because molasses was the workhorse sweetener of the American Midwest — shelf-stable and generally cheaper than refined sugar, and it was commonly paired with the saleratus and soda that came into wide use in quick baking over the course of the century. The contributed-recipe format, with each dish credited to a named housewife and her town, was standard in community and fundraising cookbooks of the period, and it is the reason we know Mrs. C. Hawks of Goshen, Indiana, at all. "Drop" in this era described the method rather than the result: batter dropped by spoon into pans or onto a sheet, as opposed to dough rolled and cut. Naming a recipe "Best" was likewise a familiar habit of such books.