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Molasses Cookies
1 cup molasses 1 tablespoon ginger ½ cup shortening, butter 1 tablespoon soda and lard mixed 2 tablespoons warm milk 2½ cups bread flour 1 teaspoon salt Heat molasses to boiling-point, add shortening, ginger, soda dissolved in warm milk, salt, and flour. Proceed as for Ginger Snaps.
A terse Fannie Farmer formula that assumes you have just read the Ginger Snaps recipe above it. The ingredient list was set in two columns and has run together in transcription, so read the quantities with care.
- The garbled columnThe two-column ingredient list has collapsed into one line. Read it as: 1 cup molasses, ½ cup shortening (butter and lard mixed), 2½ cups bread flour, 1 tablespoon ginger, 1 tablespoon soda, 2 tablespoons warm milk, 1 teaspoon salt. The stray "1" before "½ cup shortening" is an artefact of the interleaved columns; which line it belongs to cannot be determined from the transcription.
- That tablespoon of sodaA full tablespoon is far more than a modern cook would use — two to three times what a recipe with this much flour would call for today. Against a cup of molasses it gives a dark, puffed cookie and can leave a faintly soapy-alkaline taste. A modern cook may prefer 1 to 1½ teaspoons.
- "Proceed as for Ginger Snaps"That means: chill the dough thoroughly, roll it very thin on a floured board, cut in rounds, and bake on greased sheets. The dough is slack and sticky while warm and unworkable until cold, so an hour in the refrigerator is the hinge of the whole recipe.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven direction; it defers to the Ginger Snaps recipe, which calls only for a moderate oven — conventionally read today as about 350°F. Thin molasses cookies scorch quickly because of the sugar in the molasses — 8 to 10 minutes is usually enough, and they firm up as they cool.
- Bread flourBread flour is the standard flour in Farmer's recipes rather than a special choice here, though the higher-gluten flour does help a very thin rolled dough hold together. All-purpose works and gives a more tender cookie; do not substitute cake flour.
- MolassesThe molasses intended is ordinary cane molasses, not blackstrap. Blackstrap is bitter and less acidic, so it gives the soda less to react with. Heating the molasses to boiling before adding the shortening melts the fat evenly and is worth doing as written.
- Lard and butterThe half-and-half mix is for flavour plus crispness. All butter gives a softer, spreadier cookie; modern vegetable shortening substitutes for the lard without much loss.
- YieldNo count is given. Rolled thin and cut at about 2½ inches, this dough makes roughly four dozen.
Molasses was the working sweetener of the American kitchen long after refined sugar became affordable, and it survived in cookies and gingerbreads because its flavour was wanted, not merely tolerated. The pairing with soda is chemical as much as culinary: molasses is acidic, and bicarbonate of soda reacts with it to leaven the dough and to darken it, which is why so many nineteenth-century molasses recipes carry soda quantities that look reckless now. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (first published 1896) grouped gingerbreads, cookies and wafers together and wrote them in a chain, each recipe borrowing its method from the one before, a habit of compression that assumed the reader was working through the chapter rather than dipping into it. The result here is a recipe that gives the ingredients precisely — the level measurement Farmer did much to popularise and standardise — while leaving the entire shaping and baking procedure to a cross-reference.