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Molasses Cookies (Mrs W J Fendick t cinnamon t)
2 C sugar 1 1/2 C melted lard 1 T soda 2/3 C boiling water Mrs. W. J. Fendick. 1 t cinnamon 1 t ginger 7 C flour 3 eggs (beaten) Mix up at night. In morning roll, cut out and bake 1 C sugar 1. C molasses 1 C shortening 3 eggs 2 t ginger 2 t cinnamon
This is a community-cookbook entry set in type from a handwritten card, and the ingredient list has been scrambled and partly duplicated. Read it as one dough: sugar, molasses, shortening, eggs, spices and flour, mixed the night before and rolled the next morning.
- Reconcile the doubled listThe eggs appear twice (3 and 3) and the spices appear twice (1 t each, then 2 t each). Almost certainly one dough of 3 eggs with roughly 2 teaspoons each ginger and cinnamon; using both sets would double the eggs against a fixed 7 cups of flour.
- No leavening is givenMany molasses rolled cookies of this period called for saleratus or baking soda, often dissolved in hot water or stirred into the molasses. Its absence here may be an omission rather than a deliberate style. Without it the cookies bake dense and hard rather than short and crisp.
- No salt eitherThe recipe calls for none. With modern unsalted vegetable shortening or butter, half a teaspoon of salt keeps the molasses from tasting flat.
- ShorteningLard or a solid vegetable shortening, measured solid, not melted. Butter works and tastes better but softens the dough, so the overnight chill becomes essential rather than optional.
- MolassesUse unsulphured dark molasses, not blackstrap and not treacle. Blackstrap is markedly more bitter and mineral-tasting.
- The overnight rest is the point"Mix up at night" is what makes 7 cups of flour manageable. Chilling firms the fat, hydrates the flour and lets the spices bloom; the dough rolls thin without tearing or sticking. Do not shortcut it to an hour.
- OvenThe original gives none. Molasses rolled cookies of this type bake at 350-375F, 8 to 10 minutes, until the edges are set and the centers still look slightly soft. They firm as they cool; a cookie baked until hard in the oven will be a brick at room temperature.
- YieldSeven cups of flour is a large batch by modern standards: roughly six to seven dozen cookies cut at about 2 1/2 inches. The dough halves cleanly if that is more than you want.
Rolled molasses cookies were a staple of community cookbooks, and a collection like this one gathered them by the dozen because the ingredients kept well in a pantry: molasses, flour, lard, ground ginger and cinnamon. The overnight rest is a domestic-labor detail as much as a baking one, mixing the heavy dough after supper meant the morning's work was only rolling and cutting. Contributors to such collections often wrote recipes out from memory, which may be why steps a practised cook would not forget, the soda, the salt, the oven, go unrecorded here while the spices are written down twice.