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Molasses Cookies (Tsp salt tsp cassia cup sugar)
1/4 tsp. salt 1 tsp. cassia 1 cup sugar (good) 1 cup molasses (scant) 1 cup butter and lard 1/4 cup hot water (scant) 1 tsp. Slade's cloves 2 eggs 1 tsp. Slade's ginger 1 tsp. Slade's nutmeg 1 tsp. soda Flour to make stiff batter, roll thin, bake in hot oven.
— A Friend
A typical turn-of-the-century rolled molasses cookie: heavily spiced, softened with soda and hot water, and dependent entirely on the cook's judgment for the flour. A few conventions need translating.
- CassiaCassia is the coarser, more pungent cinnamon sold as ordinary ground cinnamon in most American supermarkets today. Use cinnamon straight across, one teaspoon.
- Slade'sD. & L. Slade Co. of Boston was a spice and condiment packer whose brand name turns up in New England community cookbooks; why a contributor named it is not recorded. Read it as plain ground cloves, ginger and nutmeg.
- "Butter and lard"One cup total, split between the two; the recipe does not say in what proportion, and half and half is a reasonable default. All butter works; the lard was there for tenderness and economy, and shortening gives a similar crumb.
- The soda and hot waterThis is the hinge. Dissolve the teaspoon of soda in the scant quarter cup of hot water and add it to the molasses, which is acidic; the reaction lightens the dough and takes the raw edge off the molasses. Sifting the soda into the flour instead tends to give a less even lift.
- Flour to make stiff batterGenuinely unspecified. Expect somewhere in the range of five to six cups for this quantity of liquid, added until the dough holds a shape but is still soft; chilling it an hour makes thin rolling possible. Don't work it past stiff or the cookies turn tough.
- A hot ovenIn period usage that covers roughly 400-450F. Thin molasses dough with a cup of sugar and a cup of molasses scorches quickly at that heat, so watch from about six minutes and pull the sheets when the edges set and the centers still look soft.
- YieldA full cup each of sugar, molasses and fat makes a large batch — five to six dozen thin cookies rolled to about an eighth of an inch. The dough keeps well wrapped in the refrigerator for several days if you want to bake in stages.
Molasses was a working sweetener of the American Northeast long after white sugar became affordable, and cookies like this one -- soda-raised, dark, heavily spiced -- were an everyday product of that habit. The recipe's structure, a bare column of quantities with no method beyond "roll thin, bake in hot oven," is characteristic of church and society cookbooks: contributors were writing for other experienced cooks and saw no reason to spell out familiar steps. The naming of Slade's, a Boston spice house, points to a New England origin, though the firm was in business over many decades and the brand name alone does not date the book closely. The signature "A Friend" was one common way for a contributor to give a recipe without giving her name.