Spice Nuts
1 pound sugar. 1 pound flour. 1 pint molasses. Mix well. 3/4 pound butter. 3 tablespoonfuls ginger. 1 tablespoonful allspice. 1 tablespoonful cinnamon. Bake in small drops or cakes.--Mrs. Dr. J.
A contributor's shorthand for a molasses-ginger drop cookie, written for someone who already knew what the dough should look like. Two things are missing entirely: any leavening and any oven instruction.
- The flour is the hingeOne pound of flour (about 3 1/2 cups) against a pint of molasses, a pound of sugar and 3/4 pound of butter gives a slack batter that will run into one sheet on the pan. Some nineteenth-century spice-nut recipes finish instead with "flour enough to make a stiff dough"; expect to work in considerably more flour, adding it until the dough holds a mounded spoonful.
- No leavening is givenRelated recipes of this type often carry a teaspoon or so of saleratus (baking soda) dissolved in the molasses, which both lifts the cookie and cuts the acidity. Without it these bake dense and hard — which may well be what was wanted, since spice nuts were meant to keep.
- Oven temperatureNone is stated, and the recipe gives no oven term to translate. Molasses and sugar in this quantity scorch readily, so 325-350F for 8 to 12 minutes is a sensible modern range, with the pans rotated.
- A pint of molassesTwo cups, roughly 24 ounces by weight. Use unsulphured dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is far more bitter than the table molasses of the period.
- Three tablespoons of gingerNot a misprint for the era, but a very forward amount of ground ginger against 3 1/2 cups of flour. If you increase the flour as suggested above, the spicing lands about right; if you follow the recipe literally the ginger dominates.
- "Small drops or cakes"Either teaspoon-sized drops spaced well apart, or a stiffened dough rolled thin and cut into rounds. The drops spread; leave two inches between them.
- YieldA very large batch: the quantities here run well past six dozen small cookies, and more again with the extra flour. They firm as they cool and keep for weeks in a tin — the point of the style.
"Spice nuts" is an English name for the small, hard, heavily spiced cakes that appear across northern Europe as pepernoten, Pfeffernüsse and gingerbread nuts — nut here understood to refer to size and hardness rather than to an ingredient. In American cookbooks of the period molasses commonly stands in for the honey of the European versions, with ginger carrying the spicing. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (first published in the late 1870s), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from recipes solicited from Virginia housewives, credits its contributions to their senders, initials and all; entries of this kind often assume knowledge the reader was expected to bring.