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Ginger Cookies
1 cup molasses 1 tablespoon soda 1 cup sugar 1 egg 1 tablespoon ginger 1 teaspoon cinnamon 1 tablespoon vinegar Pinch of salt Five Roses flour to roll.
Bring molasses to a scald and pour in soda dissolved in a little warm water.
Pour while foaming over sugar, egg, ginger, cinnamon and salt beaten together. Then add vinegar and flour enough to roll stirred in as lightly as possible.
A rolled molasses cooky with no butter or lard in it at all — the softness comes entirely from the hot molasses and the soda reaction, which means the dough must be handled while it is still warm and soft.
- Work fast, and stir in the flour lightlyThe hinge is the foaming stage: the scalded molasses and dissolved soda must be combined with the sugar and egg while still active, and the flour folded in with as few strokes as possible. Overworking a soft, warm, fatless dough develops gluten and gives you a hard cooky rather than a snappy one.
- "Bring molasses to a scald"Heat it until it just steams and shivers at the edges, not to a rolling boil. Boiled molasses tightens and turns bitter, and it will foam violently over the pan when the soda goes in — use a pan three times the volume of the molasses.
- The soda is a large doseA tablespoon of soda to a cup of molasses is heavy by modern standards; most present-day molasses cookies use a third to two-thirds as much. The vinegar and the acidity of old-style sulphured molasses were meant to take it up; with today's unsulphured molasses, expect a pronounced dark, faintly soapy note. Two teaspoons is closer to current taste.
- Molasses to useOrdinary dark cooking molasses or full-flavour unsulphured. Not blackstrap, which is too bitter for the quantity here, and not treacle-thick sorghum, which behaves differently under soda.
- "Flour to roll"Reckon on 3 1/2 to 4 cups of all-purpose. Add it in stages and stop when the dough just holds together — it will be tacky. Chill it an hour before rolling; the dough firms up considerably as the molasses cools.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard spring-wheat flour of the period, stronger than modern all-purpose and promoted by the miller for every kind of baking. All-purpose is the better substitute for cookies; bread flour will make them tough given how much handling rolled dough gets.
- Oven and timeThe original gives none. Roll thin — 1/8 inch — and bake at 350F for 8 to 10 minutes, until the edges are set and the centres still look slightly soft. They crisp as they cool.
- YieldAbout four to five dozen 2 1/2-inch cookies. Being fat-free, they keep hard and well for weeks in a tin.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and distributed to buyers of its flour, so nearly every recipe in it is a quiet advertisement for hard Canadian spring wheat — hence "Five Roses flour to roll" rather than a stated quantity. Molasses-and-soda cookies of this kind were a North American staple long before shortening was cheap: molasses was an everyday sweetener, and soda supplied both lift and the characteristic dark colour and crackled top. The vinegar alongside a heavy hand of soda may reflect an older habit, from the years when soda strength varied from batch to batch and acid was added to be certain it was all used up. Cookies with no fat in them were prized less for delicacy than for durability — made in quantity and meant to last.