Ginger Cakes
Put 1 pint of molasses and 1 tablespoonful each of lard and butter in a bowl; stand over hot water until just warm enough to melt the shortening. Add 1 cupful of milk, 1 tablespoonful of ground ginger, 1/2 teaspoonful of salt, 1 pint of flour mixed with 1 scant teaspoonful of sifted soda and 1/2 teaspoonful of bakingpowder. Work well together then add sufficient flour to make a rather stiff dough. Roll out, cut with a scalloped cutter and bake on buttered pans in a hot oven.
A lean molasses cookie of the old sort — rolled, cut and baked rather than dropped. The whole thing turns on the softness of the dough and a short bake.
- The hinge: keep the dough soft"Sufficient flour to make a rather stiff dough" invites over-flouring, which gives hard, dry cakes. Add just enough that the dough can be rolled on a well-floured board, chill it an hour first, and roll it about 3/8 inch thick.
- Pints and cupsA pint of molasses is 2 cups. A pint of flour here is a dry measure, roughly 2 cups (about 8 oz), and the recipe then calls for more on top of it — with 3 cups of liquid in the bowl, expect to add a good deal more flour before the dough will roll. The recipe leaves the amount open on purpose, so go by feel rather than a figure.
- "A hot oven"Around 400F. Molasses scorches, so watch the undersides; 8 to 10 minutes is usually enough, and the cakes should still look slightly soft in the centre when you pull them.
- MolassesUse ordinary unsulphured molasses, not blackstrap, which is far more bitter than the cooking molasses of the period. Warming it with the fat, as directed, only needs to reach blood heat — do not cook it.
- Shortening and sodaA tablespoon each of lard and butter for two cups of molasses is very little fat, and it makes a chewy, bready cake rather than a rich one. Butter alone works if you have no lard. The soda reacts with the molasses acid, so mix and bake without long delay once the flour is in.
- YieldSeveral dozen cakes from a 2 1/2-inch scalloped cutter; this is a large batch, and the exact count depends on how much flour the dough takes. Baked on buttered pans they will stick if left to cool completely — lift them off while warm.
Ginger cakes of this kind — rolled thin, cut with a fluted cutter and sold by the dozen — were an everyday cheap sweet in nineteenth-century America; molasses gingerbread was sold at militia musters and fairs, and is sometimes said to have been called muster gingerbread on that account. Molasses did the work of sugar because it was substantially cheaper, a byproduct of cane sugar refining that arrived in barrels and kept well, and ginger was among the cheaper spices a modest household might stock. A tablespoon each of lard and butter is a token amount of fat, and the sweetening and flavour come from the molasses jug. The double leavening — soda for the acid in the molasses, a little baking powder besides — belongs to the period after commercial baking powder came in, when the two were often used side by side.