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Ginger Balls No 2
1/2 cup brown sugar. 2 cups flour. 2 tablespoons buttermilk. 1 scant teaspoon soda. 1 scant cup butter. 2 teaspoons cinnamon. 1 cup crystallized ginger cut in pieces. 1/2 cup nuts. 2 eggs beaten very light.
Drop in greased pan and bake.
A terse drop-cookie formula that assumes the reader already knows how a cookie dough is put together. The two things it never says are the oven temperature and the bake time, so those have to be supplied.
- Oven and timingBake at 350F for 12 to 15 minutes, until the edges are set and the centres still look slightly soft. These are butter-heavy and will spread, then firm as they cool.
- A scant cup of butterThat is just under 8 oz, or slightly less than two sticks. Against only 1/2 cup of brown sugar and 2 cups of flour, this is a very rich, barely sweet dough; the crystallized ginger contributes as much sweetness as the sugar does.
- Soda and buttermilkTwo tablespoons of buttermilk is nowhere near enough acid to neutralise a scant teaspoon of soda; the usual proportion is closer to a cup per teaspoon. Expect a mild lift and a faint alkaline browning rather than a dramatic rise, and measure the soda level rather than heaped.
- Mixing order, unstatedCream the butter and brown sugar, beat in the eggs, then the buttermilk, then the flour sifted with the soda and cinnamon, and fold in the ginger and nuts last so they do not tear the dough.
- Crystallized gingerA full cup, cut small, is the point of the recipe. Buy it in whole slices rather than pre-diced sugar-dusted nubs, and cut it with a lightly oiled knife or scissors. Toss the pieces in a spoonful of the measured flour so they do not sink into the bottom of each cookie.
- NutsThe book does not specify; walnuts or pecans, chopped, suit the ginger. Toast them first for ten minutes at the same oven temperature.
- Balls, not reallyThe title says balls but the instruction says drop. The dough is soft enough to drop by teaspoonfuls; chilling it for an hour lets you roll it into walnut-sized balls instead, which hold a rounder shape.
- YieldAbout three dozen small cookies from this quantity. Space them two inches apart, as they spread.
Recipes of this era were often printed in the compressed telegraphic style of a newspaper column inch rather than the numbered steps of a modern cookbook: ingredients in a run-on list, a verb or two at the end, and the assumption that the reader had baked before. Crystallized ginger was imported chiefly from China and the Caribbean and was familiar in American baking in the 1910s and 1920s, sold by the pound at the grocer and used where fresh ginger would have been impractical. The buttermilk-and-soda pairing is a leavening habit older than reliable commercial baking powder, and one that persisted in home recipes after powder was widely available.