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Spice Cookies
½ cup molasses 2 cups flour 1/4 cup sugar ½ teaspoon soda 1½ tablespoons butter ½ teaspoon salt 1½ tablespoons lard ½ teaspoon clove 1 tablespoon milk ½ teaspoon cinnamon ½ teaspoon nutmeg Heat molasses to boiling-point. Add sugar, shortening, and milk. Mix and sift dry ingredients, and add to first mixture. Chill thoroughly, and proceed as with Ginger Snaps.
A rolled molasses cookie built on the same method as the book's Ginger Snaps: boil the molasses, beat in fat and sugar, work in the dry ingredients, chill hard, then roll thin. The chilling is not optional — warm molasses dough is unrollable.
- Proceed as with Ginger SnapsThe cross-reference sends you to the snap method: roll the chilled dough as thin as you can manage on a floured board, cut, and bake on a sheet until set. Snap doughs of this kind were rolled very thin, which is what makes them crisp rather than cakey.
- OvenNo temperature is given because the book assumed a range you judged by hand. Bake at 350F for 8-10 minutes for thin cookies; they scorch quickly because of the sugar in the molasses, so watch the last two minutes.
- Lard and butter togetherThe half-and-half split gives tenderness from the lard and flavor from the butter. Modern shortening or all butter both work; all butter spreads a little more and browns faster.
- Soda, not baking powderThe soda reacts with the acid in the molasses, which is why no baking powder appears. Sift it with the flour so it disperses; a lump of soda in a dark dough leaves a soapy patch you will not see until you taste it.
- MolassesUse unsulphured baking molasses rather than blackstrap, which is markedly more bitter. Bringing it to a boil thins it and helps it take up the sugar and fat smoothly.
- Spice quantitiesThe printed amounts are uneven: ½ teaspoon clove against 1½ teaspoons each of cinnamon and nutmeg, and the same "1½" recurs through the whole column, which suggests the figures have been garbled in transcription. Season to taste.
- ChillingTwo hours in the refrigerator, or overnight, is realistic. Work with a quarter of the dough at a time and keep the rest cold, or it turns sticky on the board and you end up flouring it into toughness.
- YieldRolled thin, this quantity of dough gives several dozen small cookies. They crisp as they cool and keep well in a tin.
Spice cookies of this type descend from the broad family of English and Dutch molasses-and-spice biscuits that became a staple of American home baking once West Indian molasses was cheap and plentiful — it was for most of the nineteenth century the everyday sweetener, with refined white sugar a comparative luxury used here in only a quarter cup. The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book groups gingerbreads, cookies and wafers together because they share one technique: a dark, acid, soda-leavened dough that can be rolled thin and cut, and that keeps for weeks in a tin, which mattered in a household baking once a week rather than daily. Hence the instruction to "proceed as with Ginger Snaps": so many recipes in this section are essentially the same dough under different spices.