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Ginger Cookies (One egg one cup sugar one cup)
One egg, one cup sugar, one cup molasses, one table-spoon soda, one of vinegar, one of ginger; roll thin and bake quickly.
A contributor's shorthand recipe of the kind that fills Buckeye Cookery — the flour and the fat are simply assumed. Reading it needs a little reconstruction before you touch a bowl.
- The missing flourNo flour is listed, because the writer expected the cook to add it until the dough could be rolled. With one egg, a cup of sugar and a cup of molasses you are looking at roughly 4 to 4 1/2 cups of flour for a stiff, rollable dough. Add it gradually and stop when the dough stops sticking to the board.
- The missing fatMany nineteenth-century ginger cookie doughs included butter, lard or shortening creamed with the sugar; roughly half a cup would suit a batch this size. Made without any fat, these bake up hard and dry — closer to a keeping biscuit than a cookie, which may well have been the intent.
- Soda and vinegarA tablespoon of soda is not necessarily a misprint: molasses of the period was acidic, and the tablespoon of vinegar adds a further jolt of acid to start the reaction, though it is far too little to neutralise that much soda on its own. If your molasses is a mild modern one, a scant tablespoon of soda guards against a soapy, metallic edge.
- Molasses, not blackstrapUse mild or full-flavour unsulphured molasses. Blackstrap is a different product — bitter and mineral — and will dominate the ginger entirely.
- GingerA tablespoon of ground ginger in a batch this size gives a genuinely hot cookie by current standards, so treat a tablespoon as a ceiling rather than a starting point.
- Roll thinSomething around an eighth of an inch is a reasonable reading of "roll thin." Thick-rolled dough with this much soda puffs and goes cakey. Chill the dough first if it fights you.
- "Bake quickly"Read this as a hot oven; something in the region of 400 to 425F is the usual modern equivalent. Rolled very thin the cookies need only 6 to 8 minutes, and they set as they cool, so pull them when the edges have just darkened.
- YieldExpect about five to six dozen two-and-a-half-inch rounds, depending on how thin you roll and how much flour the dough takes.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping was published in 1877 out of Minneapolis, Minnesota, growing from an earlier Ohio church-community collection, and was assembled from recipes contributed by housewives; its terseness is a direct product of that origin: a woman writing down her own ginger cookies for a neighbour saw no reason to mention flour, any more than she would mention a bowl. Molasses and ginger cookies were a staple of the American keeping pantry because both ingredients were cheap, shelf-stable and did not depend on a dairy or an orchard — molasses came in quantity as a byproduct of sugar production, and dried ginger travelled well. Soda with an added acid such as vinegar was one of several leavening approaches in use at the time, alongside saleratus with sour milk and, by the 1870s, commercial baking powder. Ginger cookie recipes of this kind recur in such community collections under different contributors' names.