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Spice Cookies
1/2 cup molasses 2 cups flour 1/4 cup sugar 1/2 teaspoon soda 1 1/2 tablespoons butter 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 1/2 tablespoons lard 1/2 teaspoon clove 1 tablespoon milk 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg Heat molasses to boiling-point. Add sugar, shortening, and milk. Mix and sift dry ingredients, and add to first mixture. Chill thoroughly, and proceed as with Ginger Snaps.
A stiff rolled molasses cookie of the type meant to be cut thin and baked crisp. The ingredient list was set in two columns in the original, so read it as pairs rather than in sequence.
- The cross-reference"Proceed as with Ginger Snaps" sends the cook back to that recipe's method: the chilled dough is tossed on a floured board, rolled very thin, cut in small rounds and baked on a buttered sheet. The dough is far too stiff to drop or press.
- OvenThe book gives none here. Thin rolled molasses cookies want a moderate oven, 350–375F, for 8 to 10 minutes; they firm as they cool, so pull them when the edges are set and the centres still look slightly soft.
- Boiling the molassesHeating the molasses to boiling before adding sugar and fat thins the syrup so it takes up the fat and milk smoothly. Let it cool a little before adding the flour or the dough will be slack.
- LardThe 1 1/2 tablespoons lard plus 1 1/2 tablespoons butter can be replaced with 3 tablespoons butter or shortening. Lard gives a shorter, crisper cookie; butter gives more flavour and slightly more spread.
- Soda, not powderHalf a teaspoon of baking soda is the only leavening, and it works against the acidity of the molasses. Do not substitute baking powder.
- Chilling"Chill thoroughly" means at least an hour, and overnight is better. This dough is soft and greasy at room temperature and will tear rather than roll.
- SpicesClove, cinnamon and nutmeg at half a teaspoon each is modest by current taste. Ground spices lose their edge in storage, so if yours have been open a year, use a little more.
- YieldTwo cups of flour rolled thin gives roughly three to four dozen small cookies, depending on the cutter.
Molasses was the everyday sweetener in American baking well into the twentieth century, cheaper than refined sugar and shipped in barrels from Caribbean and Louisiana sugar refining; recipes like this one use it as much for economy as for flavour. The pairing of molasses with baking soda was a common household practice, the acid in the syrup supplying the lift that soda alone could not, and it helps explain why so many nineteenth-century cookie and cake recipes call for soda where a modern book would reach for baking powder. Spice cookies of this kind -- thin, hard, keeping for weeks in a tin -- were made in large batches precisely because they did keep, and they are close cousins to the ginger snap the recipe defers to for its method.