Home › Desserts › Molasses Drops
Molasses Drops
teaspoon salt cup butter cup boiling water cup molasses 1 teaspoon soda 1 tablespoon ginger 1 teaspoon cinnamon flour Pour boiling water over butter; add remaining ingredients, using sufficient flour to make a drop batter. Drop from tablespoon on to buttered tin. Bake in moderate oven fifteen minutes.
A soft molasses drop cookie of the sort that filled New England cookie jars. The method is simple, but the quantities as printed are incomplete, so the batter has to be judged by eye.
- The quantities are unreliableSalt, butter, water and molasses are all given without their fractions, so the proportions cannot be taken from the page as printed. A plausible reconstruction for a batch of this size would be about a cup of molasses, a half cup of butter, a half cup of boiling water and a quarter teaspoon of salt, but this is a guess, not what the page says.
- Moderate oven350F. Fifteen minutes is about right for a tablespoon-sized drop; they are done when the tops spring back and the edges have set, and they will still look soft in the centre.
- Soda, not baking powderThe single teaspoon of soda is doing all the leavening, and it works because molasses is acidic. Do not substitute baking powder; the rise and the colour both depend on the soda-molasses reaction.
- Drop batterThe flour is deliberately unmeasured. Add it until the batter holds its shape on the spoon but still slumps when it lands, softer than a rolled dough and stiffer than a cake batter. If you work from the reconstructed quantities above, something in the region of two and a half to three cups will get you there.
- Butter and boiling waterPouring the boiling water over the butter melts it and warms the mixture, which lets the molasses and spices blend smoothly. Let it cool slightly before adding the soda so it does not spend its lift in the bowl.
- Buttered tinA greased sheet pan works, though parchment is easier; molasses batters catch and burn on the bottom. Leave two inches between drops, as they spread.
- YieldOn the reconstructed quantities above, roughly two to three dozen cookies, though with the amounts missing from the page any yield is approximate. They keep well and soften further after a day in a closed tin.
Molasses was the everyday sweetener of the American Northeast long before granulated sugar became cheap, arriving in barrels through the same Atlantic trade that supplied the rum distilleries, and it remained in the cookie jar well into the twentieth century. Drop cookies like these belong to the era when a cook worked from a batter judged by feel rather than a weighed dough, which is why the flour here is simply called for without amount. Lowney's book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and it surrounded its chocolate recipes with a full complement of ordinary household baking.