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Molasses Cookies (Cup molasses tablespoon ginger)
1 cup molasses 1 tablespoon ginger 1/2 cup shortening, butter and lard mixed 1 tablespoon soda 2 1/2 cups bread flour 2 tablespoons warm milk 1 teaspoon salt Heat molasses to boiling-point, add shortening, ginger, soda dissolved in warm milk, salt, and flour. Proceed as for Ginger Snaps.
A stiff rolled molasses cookie of the old type, leavened entirely with soda against the acid in the molasses. The dough is worked hot, which is the part most likely to trip up a modern cook.
- Work the dough while warmBoiling molasses poured over the fat is what makes this dough workable; once it cools it stiffens to the point of cracking. Mix quickly, then chill only if it becomes too soft to roll, and let it come back toward room temperature before rolling.
- A tablespoon of soda is not an errorA tablespoon of soda looks large but appears as written -- Molasses is acidic and takes soda where sweet milk does not, though a tablespoon is a generous amount against one cup. Dissolving it in the warm milk before it meets the hot molasses keeps it from streaking the dough with bitter yellow patches.
- Bread flourThe flour specified as standard in books of this period. Its extra gluten lets the dough be rolled thin without tearing; modern all-purpose flour will work but gives a softer, more spreading cookie.
- "Shortening, butter and lard mixed"Here shortening is the general term for solid fat, not the hydrogenated tin: the half cup is made up of butter and lard together, though the recipe gives no proportions. Equal butter and vegetable shortening is the nearest common substitute.
- Proceed as for Ginger SnapsThe shaping and baking directions are borrowed from that recipe, which is not reproduced here; snaps of this type are rolled very thin and cut small. Thickness governs everything: thin gives the snap, thick gives a soft cakey cookie.
- OvenNo temperature is given here. Thin molasses cookies scorch easily because of the sugar, so watch them closely and pull them when the edges set; they crisp as they cool.
- GingerA tablespoon of dried ground ginger is assertive by design. If your jar has been open a year it will taste of little but dust; buy fresh ground ginger for this.
- YieldNot given. Rolled thin and cut in two-inch rounds, expect roughly four to five dozen.
Molasses did the work of sugar in much American home baking well into the twentieth century, being cheaper and, in the Northeast especially, more readily at hand. Cookies built on it belong to a large family -- ginger snaps, joe froggers, soft molasses drops -- distinguished mainly by how much flour goes in and how thin the dough is rolled. Recipes of this era lean repeatedly on the soda-and-molasses pairing for lift. The instruction to "proceed as for Ginger Snaps" is characteristic of the household manuals, which grouped like recipes together and cross-referenced rather than repeat directions.