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Molasses
Mix flour, sugar, ginger, and salt. Work in butter, using tips of fingers, and add just enough molasses to hold ingredients together. Let stand over night to get thoroughly chilled. Roll very thin, shape, and bake in a moderate oven. 1/3 cup butter 1/3 cup brown sugar 1 egg ½ cup molasses
This is Fannie Farmer's rolled molasses ginger wafer, but as printed here the method and the ingredient list do not match each other. Read the points below before you shop.
- The ingredient list is incompleteThe method calls for flour, sugar, ginger, salt, butter and molasses; the list gives butter, brown sugar, egg and molasses, with no flour, ginger or salt quantity at all, and no egg appears in the method. The flour amount is genuinely missing rather than merely archaic, so it cannot be reconstructed with confidence from the page as it stands.
- How much molasses the dough actually wantsThe instruction "just enough molasses to hold ingredients together" is the operative measure, not the 1½ cups in the list, which appears to belong to some other, wetter recipe. Add molasses a spoonful at a time until the crumbs cohere into a stiff, barely tacky dough.
- Moderate ovenConventionally taken as about 350F. For wafers rolled very thin, something in the region of 6 to 9 minutes; they firm up as they cool, so judge them just before they look done.
- The overnight rest is not optionalA high-butter, low-liquid dough of this type is unrollable warm and tears at any useful thinness. Chilling overnight lets the flour hydrate and firms the butter so the sheet can go to about 1/8 inch or less.
- Fingertips, not a mixerWorking butter in with the tips of the fingers keeps the fat in small flakes and the dough cool. A stand mixer creams the butter instead, which puffs the wafer rather than snapping it.
- Molasses to buyUse unsulphured dark molasses. Blackstrap, sold mainly as a supplement, is markedly more bitter and mineral than what this book meant.
Rolled molasses wafers were the thrifty end of the ginger family: molasses was the cheap sweetener of nineteenth-century New England, arriving by the barrel through Boston and Salem in the West Indies trade long before granulated sugar became an everyday purchase, and ginger, cloves and cinnamon were the spices any household kept. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book groups such things with the cookies and wafers rather than the cakes, and many old recipe collections carry three or four versions. Pages like this one also show how easily a book of hundreds of short formulas can go astray: the ingredient list and the method have come apart here, whether in printing, in later reprinting, or in transcription.