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Frosted Creams
5 C flour 1 T vinegar Mrs. B. H. Whitman. 1 t soda, dissolved in hot water 1 t ginger 1 t lemon extract Drop from spoon and frost when cold if so desired.
This entry is a fragment: the compositor has run the ingredient columns together and dropped most of the list. What survives is the leavening and flavoring of a standard molasses ginger cookie, with no fat, sugar, molasses, egg or liquid given. Treat it as a template rather than a working formula.
- What is missingRecipes printed under this name in the period commonly used something like a cup of molasses, a half cup each of sugar and shortening or butter, an egg, and a half cup of hot water or coffee, with about three cups of flour. The printed page here gives none of them, and the 5 cups of flour sit oddly against any such reconstruction.
- The vinegar and sodaA tablespoon of vinegar with a teaspoon of soda dissolved in hot water is an acid-base pair, and in the original it would have worked alongside molasses, which is also acidic. Dissolving soda in hot water before adding it was standard practice to prevent yellow-brown specks and a soapy taste in the baked cookie.
- Soda quantityOne teaspoon of soda for 5 cups of flour is on the light side for a drop cookie of this size, though with vinegar and molasses present it is not wildly out of range. Given the state of the text, the flour figure may be as unreliable as the rest.
- "Drop from spoon"The dough should be soft enough to fall from a spoon but hold a mound, not spread into a puddle. Chilling the dough an hour makes it far easier to portion.
- OvenThe recipe gives no baking direction. Molasses drop cookies of this type are generally baked around 350F for 10 to 12 minutes; they are done when the tops spring back and still look slightly underbaked at the center, since molasses cookies firm up considerably as they cool.
- The frosting"Frost when cold" most likely indicates a thin water icing: confectioners' sugar slaked with a spoonful of hot water or milk and a drop of vanilla or lemon, spread while still fluid so it sets to a matte shell. Frosting a warm cookie will simply melt it into the crumb.
- YieldWith the missing ingredients restored, a batch on 5 cups of flour would run to something like five or six dozen cookies. Halving it is reasonable.
- Lemon extract with gingerThe pairing turns up often in recipes of the period; lemon lifts the flat sweetness of molasses. A teaspoon is ample.
Frosted creams turn up under that name in American community cookbooks from roughly the late nineteenth century onward, and despite the name they contain no cream: they are soft molasses-ginger drop cakes finished with a thin white icing. They belonged to the class of cookies that stayed soft for days in a stone crock, which is precisely why they were favored for church suppers and bazaars where baking happened well in advance. Church cook books like this one were compiled by subscription, each contributor sending in a favorite over her own name, and the results were set in type by a local printer. The mangled state of Mrs. Whitman's entry, with her name embedded mid-list, is evident, though its cause is not, and it is a reminder that these volumes assumed a reader who already knew roughly what a molasses cookie contained.