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Ginger Drop-Cakes
Take three eggs, one cup lard, one of baking molasses, one of brown sugar, one large table-spoon ginger, one table-spoon soda dissolved in a cup of boiling water, five cups unsifted flour; drop table-spoons of this mixture into a slightly greased dripping-pan. about three inches apart. - Mrs. L. McAllister.
A plain molasses-and-soda drop cookie, typical of the era in that it names no oven temperature and no baking time. The proportions are sound; only the vessels and the leavening need translating.
- Oven and timeBake at 350F for 10 to 12 minutes, until the tops are set and spring back lightly. These go from soft to hard quickly, so pull them while the centers still look slightly underdone.
- Dripping-panA dripping-pan is a shallow rectangular metal pan, the sort set under a roast. A modern rimmed baking sheet is the equivalent; line it with parchment rather than greasing if you prefer.
- Baking molassesThis means ordinary cane molasses, dark or medium rather than blackstrap. Blackstrap is far more bitter and mineral and will overwhelm the ginger.
- The soda in boiling waterDissolving the tablespoon of soda in a cup of boiling water and stirring it into the molasses makes the batter foam up. Add it near the end, then work in the flour and get the pans into the oven without long delay, since much of the lift is chemical and immediate.
- A tablespoon of soda is a lotWith a full cup of molasses to neutralize, the quantity is defensible, but measure level rather than heaped. Too much leaves a soapy, faintly metallic aftertaste.
- Unsifted flourFive cups scooped and unsifted is roughly 25 oz, or about 700 g. The dough should be soft enough to drop from a spoon but not pour; hold back half a cup if it seems slack.
- LardOne cup of lard is about 200 g. Leaf lard or shortening gives the intended tender crumb; butter works but browns faster and spreads more, so shorten the bake by a minute or two.
- Spacing and yieldThe three inches is not decorative, as these spread considerably. Expect at least five dozen cakes from the full batch, and possibly more.
Molasses was central to Southern home baking in the late nineteenth century: cane syrup and molasses were cheap, local and shelf-stable. "Drop-cakes" is the older term for what we would call a drop cookie, cakes being any small sweet baked item rather than a layered gateau. The pairing of molasses with a large dose of soda is chemistry as much as habit, since the acid in the syrup reacts with the alkali to leaven the dough, a method that spread rapidly in American kitchens after saleratus and then bicarbonate of soda became reliably available in the mid-1800s. The attribution to Mrs. L. McAllister marks this as a contributed receipt, a compilation model behind many regional American cookbooks of the period and the reason such recipes assume the reader already knows how hot her oven should be.