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Walnut Molasses Bars
3 cups flour ½ tablespoon ginger 1/3 teaspoon grated nutineg 1/8 teaspoon clove 1 teaspoon salt Chopped walnut meat Pour water over butter and lard, then add sugar, molasses mixed with soda, flour, salt, and spices. Chill thoroughly, roll one-fourth inch thick, cut in strips three and one-half inches long by one and one-half inches wide. Sprinkle with nut meat and bake ten minutes.
A rolled molasses dough in the plain 1890s manner, cut into fingers and strewn with nuts rather than dropped or pressed. A few working figures have to be supplied before it can go into the oven.
- Missing quantitiesAmounts are given for the flour, spices, salt, molasses and shortening only; the water, sugar and soda are named in the method but never measured, and the split between butter and lard is not given either. There is no honest way to reconstruct them from the page, and a current molasses-bar formula should be used for those proportions.
- FlourThe printed page gives two flour amounts: three cups in the ingredient list and 3¼ cups at the end. The second figure is set as it stands here. Three cups is the quantity followed in this edition.
- OvenNo temperature is given, as was usual before oven gauges were common. The page uses no oven term at all, so any figure is a modern working choice: 350F for the stated ten minutes suits a quarter-inch strip.
- ShorteningButter and lard together were a common fat combination in this period, though the recipe gives no proportions. Equal parts work well here; all butter browns faster, so watch the bars earlier than the stated ten minutes.
- The hinge is the chillingA molasses dough this soft cannot be rolled warm. Chill it thoroughly, several hours or overnight, and roll it cold on a floured board, working with a quarter of the batch at a time and returning the rest to the cold.
- Soda and molassesThe soda is stirred into the molasses rather than the flour so it reacts with the acid in the syrup. Mix it in just before it joins the dry ingredients and do not let the mixture stand and foam itself out.
- NutsSprinkled walnut meat will fall off once baked unless it is pressed in. Scatter it over the rolled sheet and go over it with the rolling pin before cutting.
- YieldThree cups of flour rolled a quarter-inch thick gives roughly three dozen bars of the stated size. They keep well in a tin and firm up as they cool.
Molasses was the everyday sweetener of New England kitchens long after refined sugar became affordable, and the ginger-and-molasses rolled cookie is one of the oldest continuous American baking traditions, descended from the hard gingerbread cakes sold at fairs and muster days. Such doughs come in a whole family of versions, differing mainly in the ratio of fat to molasses and in whether they are rolled thin and crisp or thick and soft. Cutting the sheet into rectangular bars rather than rounds was a practical economy: nothing is left over to re-roll, and re-rolled molasses dough turns tough. Walnuts, cheap and locally gathered across the Northeast, were the usual finish where a household wanted something a little better than a plain ginger snap.