Ginger Cookies
1 cup molasses 2 tablespoons warm milk or water 1 tablespoon ginger 1/2 cup of soft butter 1 teaspoon soda Gold Medal flour to mix soft as can be handled on the board Mix in order given, dissolving soda in the milk. Shape on a floured board into balls the size of a hickory nut. Lay on a sheet and flatten with a tin cup or smooth tumbler to one-half inch thick.
Ft. Atkinson Ginger Bread 1 cup New Orleans molasses 1 cup boiling water 2 cups Gold Medal flour, heaped 1/2 cup butter 1 egg 1 teaspoon soda 1 teaspoon ginger 2 tablespoons sugar Stir butter and sugar together, then rub it into the flour till fine, add molasses and yolk of egg and beat well; lastly, add the boiling water and white of egg beaten stiff. Makes a thick sheet in a biscuit pan.
Two molasses recipes run together here: a rolled-and-flattened ginger cookie and a sheet gingerbread. Neither gives an oven temperature, and the cookie dough gives no flour quantity, so both need judgment on the cook's part.
- The unstated flour"Flour to mix soft as can be handled" works out to roughly 3 to 3 1/2 cups for a cup of molasses and half a cup of butter. Stop as soon as the dough stops sticking to your hands; extra flour turns these hard rather than chewy.
- Oven temperatureNeither recipe gives one; both were written for a cook judging the oven by hand. Molasses doughs scorch easily because of their sugar content, so a moderate oven, around 350F, is a sensible modern starting point: roughly 8 to 10 minutes for the cookies, pulled while still soft in the centre, and 25 to 35 minutes for the gingerbread, until a straw comes out clean.
- Hickory nutAbout the size of a large marble, roughly an inch across, smaller than a walnut. Flattened to half an inch they spread into cookies of about two and a half inches. Expect four to five dozen.
- New Orleans molassesA light to medium unsulphured cane molasses, not blackstrap. Modern blackstrap is far more bitter and mineral and will overwhelm both recipes; use ordinary unsulphured molasses.
- Soda and no other leaveningThere is no baking powder in either recipe; the soda is there to react with the acid in the molasses. The cookie soda is dissolved in the warm milk, as directed. The gingerbread gives no point of addition at all, so it presumably goes in with the flour. If your molasses is very mild the rise will be modest, which is correct for these.
- Boiling water in the gingerbreadIt goes in last, together with the beaten white, and loosens what is otherwise a stiff rubbed-in mixture. Add the white quickly and fold, or the heat will deflate it.
- Biscuit panA shallow rectangular baking pan; no size is given, so judge by the batter, which should sit deep enough to make the "thick sheet" the recipe promises. The result is cut in squares rather than turned out as a loaf.
- Tin cup or tumblerDip the base in flour or granulated sugar between cookies, otherwise the sticky dough climbs up with the glass.
The Gold Medal Flour Cook Book was one of the promotional cookbooks issued by Washburn-Crosby of Minneapolis, the milling firm that later became General Mills, and books of this kind often collected recipes sent in by home cooks with the brand name written into the ingredient list. That may account for the place-name here: "Ft. Atkinson Ginger Bread" is the kind of attribution a contributed recipe carries, tying a common dish to the town it arrived from. Molasses is doing the work in both recipes because it was a cheap and reliably acidic sweetener, which is why saleratus and later baking soda paired with it so naturally through the nineteenth century. Ginger, arriving dried and ground, was among the warm spices most households kept year-round, and gingerbread in this period meant either a soft sheet cake cut in squares or a stiff rolled cookie, both of which are represented on this page.