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Ginger Cookies (One egg one cup sugar one cup)
One egg, one cup sugar, one cup molasses, one table-spoon soda, one of vinegar, one of ginger; roll thin and bake quickly.
A shorthand recipe of the kind written for cooks who already knew what ginger cookie dough should feel like. Two essentials are missing from the list, so read the notes before mixing.
- No flour is givenThe recipe assumes you add flour until the dough can be rolled thin. Expect somewhere between 3 and 4 cups for this quantity of liquid; add it gradually and stop when the dough is stiff but still supple. Any figure printed as exact would be an invention.
- No fat is given eitherMany molasses cookie recipes of the period include butter or lard, often around half a cup, though this one names none and there is no way to know what was intended. Without any fat the cookies bake hard and snap rather than bend.
- A tablespoon of soda is not a misprintA tablespoon of soda is not obviously a misprint -- the recipe pairs it with both molasses and vinegar, two acids, so a large quantity of soda is at least internally consistent. With modern unsulphured molasses a full tablespoon can still leave a soapy, metallic edge; a teaspoon to two teaspoons is closer to a palatable result.
- Molasses, not blackstrapUse mild or full-flavour unsulphured molasses. Blackstrap, the dark final-boiling residue, will make the dough bitter.
- "Bake quickly"The recipe gives no oven description beyond this word; a hot oven of roughly 400-425F is a reasonable modern reading. Thin molasses dough at that heat is done in about 5 to 7 minutes and goes from set to scorched fast, so watch the first tray and drop the heat if the edges darken before the centres set.
- Rolling thinThe dough handles best chilled for an hour. Roll to about 1/8 inch on a lightly floured board; thicker and you get a soft cake-like cookie rather than the crisp snap intended.
- YieldAbout four dozen cookies cut at 2 1/2 inches, depending on how thin you roll.
The Dixie Cook Book belongs to the family of compiled American household books generally traced to Estelle Woods Wilcox's Buckeye Cookery, reissued in the 1880s with a Southern title page and Southern contributions; many of its recipes appear to be community submissions, which may be why so many read like notes passed between neighbours rather than tested instructions. Molasses ginger cookies were a staple of that kind of kitchen because both ingredients were cheap, kept indefinitely, and did their own leavening: soda plus an acid, here molasses reinforced with vinegar, was the standard lift before commercial baking powder became reliable and affordable in the later nineteenth century.