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Ginger Cookies
Mrs. W. A. Carson.
Two cups of molasses, two-thirds of a cup of butter, two teaspoons ginger, three teaspoons soda dissolved in a little boiling water in a cup; now fill the cup with buttermilk; do not mix too thick.
A contributor's recipe of the compact, assume-you-know-the-rest kind: no flour quantity, no oven, no time. What follows fills the gaps without changing the proportions given.
- The missing flourThe hinge of the recipe is the instruction do not mix too thick. Flour is added by feel until you have a soft, sticky dough that just holds a shape; with this much liquid that is likely to be upwards of five cups, though the recipe gives no figure. Stop while it still looks slightly too soft; the dough stiffens as it sits.
- The soda cupThree teaspoons of soda are dissolved in a splash of boiling water in a teacup, then the same cup is topped up with buttermilk — so you are adding about 1 cup of liquid in total, not a cup of buttermilk on top of the water. The mixture will foam; add it to the batter at once.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cooking molasses or dark treacle rather than blackstrap, which is markedly more bitter; blackstrap was available in the period and used in cheaper households, so it cannot be ruled out here. Golden or light molasses gives the mildest result.
- ButterTwo-thirds of a cup is about 150 g. Period butter was often salted; if yours is unsalted, half a teaspoon of salt would not be out of place, though the recipe says nothing about salt.
- Why so much sodaThree teaspoons looks alarming by modern standards, but two cups of molasses and the buttermilk (less than a full cup, once the soda water is allowed for) supply a great deal of acid for it to work against. Reducing it is likely to give a heavier cookie.
- Oven and timeNo temperature or time is given at all. Around 350F for 8 to 10 minutes suits a soft molasses dough; the cookies should still look slightly underdone at the centre when you pull them.
- Handling the doughChilling it for an hour makes a soft dough much easier to roll. Rolled about a quarter-inch thick and cut, or dropped by spoonfuls for a softer cookie.
- YieldExpect roughly five to six dozen medium cookies, depending on how much flour the dough takes.
The Home Cook Book belongs to the first wave of North American charity cookbooks, compiled from recipes contributed by named local women — here Mrs. W. A. Carson — and sold to raise money for a local cause. The format explains the terseness: these were notes passed between cooks who already knew what a ginger cookie dough should feel like, not instructions for beginners. Molasses-and-soda cookies of this type were a staple of the period because both ingredients were cheap, kept indefinitely, and worked together: saleratus or soda needed an acid partner, and molasses and buttermilk both obliged, giving lift at a time when commercial baking powder, though available from the 1860s, had not yet displaced older methods in every home kitchen. Ginger, imported and shelf-stable, was among the spices a household could most reliably keep on hand, which is why so much 19th-century baking tastes of it.