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Ginger Cookies (Two cups molasses one of lard)
Two cups molasses, one of lard, one of sugar, two-thirds cup sour milk, table-spoon ginger, three tea-spoons soda stirred in the flour and one in the milk, two eggs. - Miss Tina Lay,
A contributor's shorthand from a community cookbook: the ingredients are listed, the method is assumed. Anyone making it is filling in the flour, the mixing order and the oven.
- The flour is not givenThe recipe names no quantity, and there is no honest way to convert what isn't there. Two cups molasses plus a cup each of lard and sugar is a large batch; expect somewhere in the range of 7 to 9 cups of flour to reach a soft rolling dough, added gradually until it stops sticking to the hands.
- Soda, and why it is splitFour teaspoons total: three sifted into the flour, one dissolved in the sour milk. The soda in the milk reacts with the lactic acid at once; the soda in the flour has the molasses to work against as the cookies bake. The recipe does not explain the split, but with this much molasses there is plenty of acid for four teaspoons, and soda left unneutralised is what gives a soapy, metallic taste.
- Sour milkNot spoiled milk but naturally clabbered, roughly the acidity of buttermilk. Cultured buttermilk is the direct substitute; two-thirds cup of milk with two teaspoons of lemon juice or vinegar, rested ten minutes, also works.
- LardOne cup. The recipe gives no method; creaming it with the sugar is the usual approach. Leaf lard or modern rendered lard gives a short, slightly crisp crumb. Butter or shortening can stand in cup for cup, though butter browns faster and spreads more.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cooking molasses rather than blackstrap, which is markedly more bitter and would overwhelm the single tablespoon of ginger. What the contributor actually had is not recorded.
- No oven temperatureThe recipe gives none, and does not say whether the cookies are rolled or dropped. Treated as a rolled cookie about a quarter-inch thick, 350F for 8 to 12 minutes works; pull them when the edges set and the centres still look soft, as molasses cookies firm considerably as they cool.
- Chill before rollingThe dough is slack from the molasses and the eggs. An hour in the refrigerator makes it workable and keeps the cookies from spreading into one another.
- YieldA batch this size gives roughly six to eight dozen cookies of ordinary size. It halves cleanly if that is more than a household needs.
The Dixie Cook-Book (1883, compiled by Estelle Woods Wilcox) was largely an adaptation of Buckeye Cookery for the Southern market, and it carries signed contributions like this one, in a format that assumes a good deal of the reader: a list of proportions, no method, no oven setting, because the reader was assumed to have made cookies before. Molasses did the work sugar does now in much of this baking, and the pairing of molasses with soda and sour milk was a familiar chemical leavening, though commercial baking powder was already widely sold by the 1880s. Ginger cookies of this type kept well in a tin.