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Molasses Cookies (Cup light brown sugar creamed)
1 cup light brown sugar creamed with scant cup of shortening (1/3 lard, 2/3 butter) 1 cup molasses 2 eggs 1 tbsp. soda dissolved in just a little warm water 1 desert spoonful Slade's ginger Flour to mix right to roll Bake in a quick oven.
— Mrs. Harry T. Bryant
A typical rolled molasses cookie from a church-society collection, written for a cook who already knew what the dough should feel like. The gaps are in the flour quantity and the oven, and both are workable.
- "Flour to mix right to roll"Expect roughly 5 to 6 cups of all-purpose flour. Add it until the dough is soft but no longer tacky, then chill it for an hour or more before rolling; molasses dough is much easier to handle cold and will absorb a little more flour on the board.
- A quick ovenGenerally taken to mean somewhere around 400-425F, hotter than most modern bakers would use for a molasses cookie. Sugar and molasses both scorch quickly at that heat, so watch closely from about six minutes; 375F gives a more forgiving cookie.
- The sodaA full tablespoon is a large amount, but molasses is acidic and this is a large batch of dough, so it is in the range these old recipes use. Dissolve it in warm water first: undissolved soda tends to leave brown speckles and a soapy taste.
- Slade's gingerD. & L. Slade Co. of Boston sold ground spices and mustard; the brand simply meant good ground ginger. A dessert spoon is two teaspoons, so use 2 tsp ground ginger.
- The shorteningA scant cup, one third lard and two thirds butter, comes to about 3 oz lard and 5 oz butter. All butter works and tastes better; all vegetable shortening gives a softer, cakier cookie and loses the flavor.
- MolassesUse a dark baking molasses rather than blackstrap, which is bitter and was not the everyday cooking molasses of the period.
- Rolling and yieldRoll about 1/4 inch thick for a chewy cookie, 1/8 inch for a snapping one. The batch is large about five to six dozen cookies at 2 1/2 inches.
Philathea cook books were produced by Philathea classes, the young women's Bible classes of the Baraca-Philathea movement that spread through American Protestant Sunday schools in the early twentieth century; the name is usually glossed as "lovers of truth." Selling a compiled cook book was the standard way such a class raised money, which is why the recipes come signed with members' names and assume a shared baseline of kitchen knowledge no oven temperatures, no yields, no explanation of what "right to roll" feels like. Molasses cookies belong to the older New England sweetening tradition, where barrels of molasses from the West Indies trade were cheaper and more common in the pantry than refined sugar; the combination of molasses, soda and ginger long predates baking powder and gave a cookie that kept well in a stone crock. The call for a specific brand of ginger is a small period detail: packaged, guaranteed-pure ground spices were still new enough in the grocery trade to be worth naming.