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Soft Molasses Cookies
1 cup molasses 1/2 cup shortening, melted 1 3/4 teaspoons soda 2 teaspoons ginger 1 cup sour milk 1 teaspoon salt Flour Add soda to molasses and beat thoroughly; add milk, shortening, ginger, salt, and flour. Enough flour must be used to make mixture of right consistency to drop easily from spoon. Let stand several hours in a cold place to thoroughly chill. Toss one-half mixture at a time on slightly floured board and roll lightly to one-fourth inch thickness. Shape with a round cutter, first dipped in flour. Bake on a buttered sheet.
A soft rolled molasses cookie of the type that depends on sour milk and soda rather than eggs or sugar. The original gives no flour quantity, no oven temperature and no baking time, so the notes below fill those gaps.
- Flour, unmeasuredExpect roughly 3 1/2 to 4 cups of all-purpose flour, added a cup at a time until the dough just drops from the spoon in a soft mass. It should look too soft to roll -- the long chill is what makes it workable.
- The chill is not optionalThis is the hinge of the recipe. A molasses dough this wet cannot be rolled warm; several hours in the refrigerator, or overnight, firms the shortening and hydrates the flour so the dough takes a cutter cleanly.
- Sour milkNot spoiled milk but naturally soured, slightly thickened milk. Substitute buttermilk, or stir 1 tablespoon of lemon juice or white vinegar into 1 cup of whole milk and let it stand ten minutes. The acid is needed to react with the soda.
- Soda1 3/4 teaspoons of baking soda is a full measure, deliberately so: it neutralizes both the molasses and the sour milk and gives the cookies their soft, slightly cakey crumb. Do not substitute baking powder.
- ShorteningIn this period shortening meant lard or a vegetable compound. Melted butter works and tastes better, though it spreads a little more; measure the 1/2 cup before melting.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cooking molasses, not blackstrap, which is markedly more bitter and will overwhelm the ginger. There is no other sweetener in the dough, so the molasses does all the work.
- OvenBake at 350F for 8 to 10 minutes, until the tops spring back when pressed lightly. They will look underdone at the center; that is correct for a soft cookie, and they firm as they cool.
- Pan"A buttered sheet" means a greased baking sheet. Parchment gives a more even bottom and keeps the sugary molasses from catching.
- YieldAbout three to four dozen cookies from a 2 1/2-inch cutter at the specified quarter-inch thickness.
Soft molasses cookies belong to the sour-milk-and-soda tradition that was common in American home baking from the mid-nineteenth century into the 1920s, when households routinely had milk on the turn and molasses was often cheaper than refined sugar. The chemistry is the point: soda beaten into molasses foams at once, and the acid in the soured milk finishes the reaction in the oven, so no eggs and no creaming are required. Ginger was a frequent partner to molasses in these recipes, both because the two flavors cover each other and because ground ginger was a pantry staple.