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Cookies (One tablespoon of butter one)
One tablespoon of butter, one cup of sugar, one egg, half a cup of milk, half a teaspoon of soda, one tablespoonful of ginger, flour to roll; cut in round cakes and bake in a rather quick oven.
A plain rolled ginger cookie of the sort kept in a stone crock — very low in fat, very high in ginger, and dependent on the cook's judgment for the flour. A few things need translating.
- "Flour to roll"Expect roughly 2½ to 3 cups of all-purpose flour. Add it in stages until the dough is firm enough to roll about ¼ inch thick without sticking; too much and the cookies bake dry and hard. The original names no quantity at all, leaving it to the cook's judgment.
- The soda wants an acidHalf a teaspoon of soda with sweet milk has little to react with beyond the trace acidity of the ginger, and may leave a faint soapy note. Many recipes of this type call for sour milk or buttermilk; if you like, use buttermilk, or add about a teaspoon of cream of tartar with the flour (roughly twice the weight of the soda).
- A rather quick ovenRoughly 400 to 425F. For thin rolled cookies that is workable but unforgiving — 400F for 7 to 9 minutes gives the same snap with less risk of scorched edges. Watch the first tray and judge the rest by it.
- One tablespoon of gingerThat is a full tablespoon of ground dried ginger for a batch this size, which reads as aggressively hot by modern standards. Ground spice also loses potency in the jar; if yours is fresh, 2 teaspoons is closer to what most palates now expect.
- One tablespoon of butterNot a misprint. These are deliberately lean cookies, closer to a ginger snap than a shortbread, and the sugar and milk carry the texture. Increasing the butter changes the dough into something that spreads and must be chilled.
- Cut in round cakesA plain round cutter or a tumbler rim, as the period cook would have used. Roll scraps once and stop; a third rolling toughens the dough.
- YieldThree to four dozen 2-inch cookies, depending on how thin you roll. They crisp as they cool and keep well in a tin for a week or more — they were built for storage, not for eating warm.
Rolled ginger cookies like this one were inexpensive to make, for the reason visible in the ingredient list: they cost almost nothing. A single tablespoon of butter, no eggs beyond one, and no nuts or dried fruit meant the recipe could be made in any week of the year, while the ginger, imported in quantity, did the work that expensive flavourings did elsewhere. Cookbooks of the 1870s and 1880s typically print half a dozen variations under headings like "Ginger Snaps," "Ginger Cakes" and simply "Cookies," the word itself generally traced to the Dutch koekje, a little cake, and carried into American English through New York. That such a recipe appears in The Home Cook Book is characteristic of the genre: these were compilations from many contributing housekeepers, and the plainest recipes were often the ones actually in daily use.