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Ginger Cakes
Mrs. Joseph Saulter.
Two cups of syrup and one cup of lard, scalded together, add one dessertspoonful of baking soda ; when cool add flour enough to make a dough ; ginger to taste ; roll out and cut into shapes with cutter; bake in a medium oven ; rub a little syrup over the tops before baking.
A plain rolled molasses cookie of the sort made in quantity and kept in a tin. The original leaves flour to the cook's judgment, so the dough is worth building slowly.
- What "syrup" meansIn a book of this period syrup is cane syrup, sorghum, or a light molasses, not corn syrup or maple. Unsulphured molasses or sorghum gives the closest flavor; blackstrap is too bitter for two full cups.
- Dessertspoonful of sodaA dessertspoon sits between a teaspoon and a tablespoon, about two teaspoons. That is a generous amount of leavening for this much syrup; an unrefined syrup should be acidic enough to take up most of it, though how much depends on the syrup used.
- Scald, then coolHeating syrup and lard together melts the fat and lets the soda foam through the hot liquid. Let the mixture cool to lukewarm before the flour goes in, or the dough is likely to turn greasy and slack and awkward to roll.
- Flour enoughThe original leaves this to the cook; expect somewhere in the region of 5 to 6 cups or more for this quantity of liquid. Add it a cup at a time until the dough is firm enough to pull away from the bowl, then stop; extra flour makes the cakes hard rather than crisp.
- Ginger to tasteFor a batch this size, 1 to 2 tablespoons of ground ginger would not be out of keeping with nineteenth-century ginger cakes, which were often heavily spiced. Cinnamon and a little ground clove are period-appropriate additions, though the recipe names only ginger.
- Medium ovenRoughly 350F. Ginger doughs heavy with molasses can scorch on the bottom before the centers set, so use parchment or a light-colored sheet and check at 8 to 10 minutes.
- The syrup washBrushing syrup on the tops before baking is what gives these their dark gloss. Use a thin coat; a heavy one will bubble and stick the cakes to the pan.
- Rest the doughAn hour in the refrigerator makes the lard firm and the dough far easier to roll thin and cut cleanly.
- YieldAround six to seven dozen cakes cut with a 2-inch cutter. They keep well for a week in a closed tin and soften as they sit.
Ginger cakes of this kind - rolled, cut, and sweetened with syrup rather than sugar - were among the most common home-baked sweets in nineteenth-century America, particularly in the South and in country households, where sorghum or cane syrup was cheaper and more reliably at hand than refined sugar. The soda-and-molasses pairing did the work now done by baking powder: the acid in unrefined syrup reacts with the soda directly. Recipes like this one circulated by attribution, credited to the contributor rather than to a source, which is how community cookbooks of the era were assembled - each entry a household's standing formula.