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Molasses Cookies
1 cupful molasses, 1 cupful sugar, 1 cupful butter or lard, 1 tablespoonful ginger, 1 tablespoonful soda, 1/2 cupful of sour milk, 2 eggs.
This is one of the terse ingredient lists common in turn-of-the-century compilations, written for cooks who already knew what a molasses cookie dough should feel like. A few things need translating before it will behave in a modern kitchen.
- No flour quantity is givenThe list stops at the eggs, and no flour amount or mixing method is stated. A dough of this size takes flour by feel — worked in until it is stiff enough to roll but still tacky — rather than by a number, and anyone following it will be judging that themselves.
- A cupfulRead it as a standard 8 oz measuring cup. Period cookbooks were inconsistent about whether butter was packed or melted; 1 cup of butter is 2 sticks, 8 oz.
- SodaA tablespoon of baking soda is a great deal by modern standards, but molasses and sour milk are both acidic and consume much of it. Any excess leaves a soapy, metallic taste, so measure level rather than heaped.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured raw milk, thick and tangy. Buttermilk is the direct modern equivalent; whole milk with a teaspoon of vinegar stirred in and left ten minutes is the usual stand-in.
- MolassesPeriod molasses was closer to today's unsulphured light or full-flavour molasses than to blackstrap, which is far more bitter and will dominate the ginger.
- Lard or butterThe choice affects the result: lard tends to give a shorter, crisper cookie, butter more flavour and a softer edge. The recipe leaves it open, so either is faithful to it.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven heat or baking time; the list stops at the eggs. Molasses doughs scorch easily because of their sugar content, so a moderate modern heat (around 350F) for roughly 8 to 12 minutes depending on thickness is a sensible starting point, pulling them while the centres still look underdone. That figure is a modern suggestion, not something the recipe states.
- YieldWith this much fat, sugar and molasses the batch is a large one, though with no flour quantity given any figure is only an estimate; something in the region of four to five dozen rolled cookies of ordinary size. It halves cleanly.
Molasses was the everyday sweetener of American baking well into the nineteenth century, cheaper than refined sugar and always at hand, and the ginger-and-molasses cookie became the standard cheap keeping cake of the household — sturdy enough for a lunch pail or a cookie jar that had to last the week. The pairing with sour milk and soda belongs to the era before commercial baking powder was universal: cooks relied on the acid already present in soured dairy and in molasses to set off the soda, which is why so many of these recipes call for what looks like an alarming amount of it. Books like this one gathered such formulas by the dozen, printed as bare lists on the assumption that the reader had made cookies before and needed only the proportions.