Home › Filling the Cooky Jar › Ginger Balls
Ginger Balls
⅓ cup melted lard ⅓ cup sugar 1 cup light molasses 1 egg (beaten) 1 teaspoon cinnamon ½ teaspoon cloves, ginger, and salt 1 teaspoon soda dissolved in 1 teaspoon hot water 3 cups Five Roses flour.
Mould into balls, roll in granulated sugar and bake.
A molasses drop-and-roll cookie of the sort every flour-company book carried, printed here with no oven temperature, no baking time and a stray line of ingredients at the end. A few decisions have to be made before the dough goes together.
- The trailing line is unreliable"½ cup milk 1 cup butter" appears after the baking instruction with no place in the method, and the recipe already has ⅓ cup melted lard as its fat. It is almost certainly type from an adjacent recipe. Adding both would give a batter far too slack to mould into balls.
- OvenNone is given. Molasses cookies of this type are baked at 350F; the sugar in the molasses browns fast, and anything hotter darkens the bottoms before the centres set. Ten to twelve minutes on a lined sheet, pulled while the tops are still slightly soft.
- LardRendered leaf lard gives a short, tender crumb, and lard was a common household baking fat in Canada in this period. Most modern shelf-stable lard is hydrogenated and works; butter or shortening in the same measure is a fair substitute, though butter will spread a little more.
- Light molassesThis means the mild, first-extraction grade — what is sold today as light or fancy molasses. Blackstrap is not a substitute: it is markedly more bitter and will overwhelm the spices.
- Soda in hot waterDissolving the soda before adding it is the whole leavening system here; the acid in the molasses does the rest. Undissolved soda leaves bitter yellow specks. Add it to the wet mixture, not the flour.
- "½ teaspoon cloves, ginger, and salt"Read as half a teaspoon of each, which is the standard reading of this shorthand and gives a modestly spiced cookie. Ground ginger at half a teaspoon in three cups of flour is restrained by current taste; a full teaspoon is defensible.
- FlourFive Roses was milled from hard Manitoba wheat and sold as a general household flour. Three cups of modern all-purpose gives a slightly softer cookie, which is no loss. Chill the dough 30 minutes if it is too sticky to roll.
- YieldAbout three dozen balls at walnut size. Roll in granulated sugar just before baking so it does not dissolve into the dough, and space them well — they spread and crack across the top.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, with mills at Keewatin and head office in Montreal, and became one of the most widely distributed cookbooks in Canada in the early twentieth century, sold cheaply or given away to promote the mill's flour. Its recipes were solicited from users of the flour, which explains both the plainness of the writing and the occasional lapse of the kind visible here — a stray line of type left standing at the end. Molasses cookies belong to the older North American baking tradition in which molasses, not refined sugar, was the everyday sweetener: cheap, shipped north from the Caribbean trade, and acidic enough to activate the saleratus or soda that replaced yeast in quick baking.