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Mammy's Ginger Cakes
2 eggs. 1/2 cup buttermilk. 1/4 teaspoon salt. 1 pt. molasses. 1 cup sugar. 1/2 cup crisco. 2 teaspoons soda. 1 tablespoon ginger. Rub with yolks of eggs; roll thin, cut with cake cutter and bake.
This is a rolled molasses cookie written in the shorthand of a cook who already knew the method — the flour is missing entirely, and so is the mixing order. Treat the ingredient list as a starting ratio rather than a complete formula.
- The missing flourNo flour is listed, yet the dough must be rolled thin and cut. With a pint of molasses, a cup of sugar, half a cup of fat and half a cup of buttermilk, it will take a great deal of flour to make a stiff rollable dough, and no figure can be recovered from the original. Work up from a soft dough by feel.
- CriscoCrisco is still sold, but the modern product has been reformulated and will not behave exactly as the original did. Any solid vegetable shortening or lard works; butter will spread more and give a crisper, thinner cake.
- Soda and buttermilkThe two teaspoons of soda have both the buttermilk and the pint of molasses to work on, and the alkalinity contributes to the dark color of these cakes. Dissolving it in the buttermilk before it meets the flour is one way to distribute it evenly.
- MolassesA pint is 2 cups, and it dominates the dough. Use unsulphured cooking molasses; blackstrap is far more bitter than what was on the shelf then, and modern "robust" molasses is closer to the mark than mild.
- Rub with yolks of eggsThis is ambiguous. It may mean rubbing the fat and sugar together with the yolks as a mixing step, or brushing yolk over the cut cakes as a glaze. If you take it as a glaze, reserve a yolk from the two eggs or use an extra one thinned with a little water.
- OvenThe original gives no temperature. Thin rolled molasses cakes want a moderate oven, 350 to 375F, for 8 to 12 minutes; they scorch quickly because of the sugar and molasses, so pull them while the centers still look slightly soft.
- YieldWith enough flour to roll, this makes a very large batch — several dozen small cakes. Halve it unless you are baking for a crowd. The dough rolls more cleanly cold.
Rolled molasses ginger cakes were a staple of American home baking through the nineteenth century — cheap, keeping well, and relying on molasses rather than costly sugar. The name here is the tell. Attributing a recipe to "Mammy" was a familiar publishing device of the period, invoking the stereotyped figure of the Black Southern cook to signal authenticity and old-fashioned goodness. The recipe itself carries no Southern marker that distinguishes it from any other buttermilk-and-soda ginger cake of the time; the label was marketing. Crisco, launched in 1911, was then barely a decade old, which is why a shortening brand name sits in an ingredient list where an older book would have said lard.