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Flour (Cup shortening melted)
1 cup molasses. 1 3/4 teaspoons soda. 1 cup sour milk. ½ cup shortening, melted 2 teaspoons ginger 1 teaspoon salt Add soda to molasses and beat thoroughly; add milk, shortening, ginger, salt, and flour. Enough flour must be used to make mixture of right consistency to drop easily from spoon. Let stand several hours in a cold place to thoroughly chill. Toss one-half mixture at a time on slightly floured board and roll lightly to one-fourth inch thickness. Shape with a round cutter, first dipped in flour. Bake on a buttered sheet.
This page has come down to us with its ingredient list clipped — only the shortening, ginger and salt survive with quantities, while the molasses, soda, milk and flour are named in the method but not measured. What follows covers the technique, which is intact, and flags what you would need from a complete version of a soft molasses cookie.
- The missing amountsThe method calls for molasses, soda, milk and flour, none of which carry a quantity on this page. There is no way to recover them from what survives here. Work from a complete printing rather than guessing.
- 1½ cup shorteningIn this period shortening usually meant lard, or a lard-and-butter mixture. Melted butter works and gives better flavour; the dough will be slightly firmer when chilled.
- Soda into the molassesThis is the hinge. Beating the soda directly into the molasses lets the acid in the molasses react at once, foaming the mixture pale and giving the cookies their lift and tender crumb. Do not stir the soda into the flour instead.
- Molasses is not what it wasPeriod molasses was often a darker, stronger, sulphured product than what is now sold. Modern light or "mild" unsulphured grades will give a paler, sweeter cookie.
- The long chill is not optionalThe batter is deliberately made soft enough to drop from a spoon, then hardened by cold so it can be rolled. Several hours in the refrigerator, or overnight; keep the second half cold while you cut the first, or it will smear on the board rather than roll.
- Rolling and flourRoll lightly and use as little board flour as will do the job — extra flour worked in at this stage is the usual cause of tough, dry molasses cookies.
- OvenNone is given. A moderate oven, 350°F, for 8 to 10 minutes; molasses browns fast and these go from done to bitter quickly. "Buttered sheet" can be parchment, which suits a sticky molasses dough better than greased metal.
Molasses was the everyday sweetener of the American kitchen long before granulated sugar became cheap, and ginger cookies of this kind — soft, dark, cut in rounds, kept in a stoneware jar — were among the most common baked goods in a nineteenth-century household. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book carries a whole run of them, drop and rolled, soft and hard, because the dough was cheap, kept well, and forgave an uneven oven. The instruction to beat soda into the molasses is a survival from the days before reliable baking powder, when cooks relied on the acidity of molasses or sour milk to activate saleratus; that this book still teaches the trick in the era of commercial baking powder says something about how firmly the technique had settled into American practice.