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Molasses Cookies
Mrs. G. Wyllie.
One cup of molasses, one tablespoon of soda; dissolve in half a cup of boiling water; one tablespoon ginger, two tablespoons butter, and flour enough to roll out thin; cut with cake cutter, and cook in quick oven.
A one-bowl rolled ginger cookie of the kind every 19th-century community cookbook carried in several versions. The dough is stiff, rolled thin, and bakes in a couple of minutes, so the whole recipe hinges on how much flour you work in and how closely you watch the oven.
- The hinge: roll it thin, watch it closeThese are meant to be crisp wafers, not soft drop cookies. Rolled to about 1/8 inch they are done in 5 to 8 minutes and go from set to burnt very quickly, since molasses scorches long before butter-and-sugar dough would.
- "Quick oven"A quick oven is usually reckoned at roughly 400-450F. For a thin molasses dough, 375-400F gives much the same crispness with a margin against scorching.
- That tablespoon of sodaA full tablespoon of baking soda to one cup of molasses is heavy by modern standards; molasses is acidic, but not that acidic. Expect a dark, puffed, faintly soapy-tasting cookie. One to two teaspoons is nearer current practice for this quantity.
- Dissolving the sodaThe boiling water is doing real work: it dissolves the soda completely so it does not leave bitter yellow specks, and it loosens the molasses. Stir the soda into the water off the heat, then beat it into the molasses, which will foam up.
- "Flour enough"Genuinely ambiguous, and deliberately so — it depends on your molasses. Reckon on roughly 3 to 3 1/2 cups for a dough stiff enough to roll thin without sticking, added a half cup at a time.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cooking molasses. Blackstrap is far more bitter and less sweet and will make a harsh cookie. Note also that there is no sugar at all here; the molasses is the entire sweetener.
- ButterTwo tablespoons for a cup of molasses is a lean dough by any standard, which is part of why these bake crisp and keep well. Butter of the period was often salted; if you use unsalted, add a pinch of salt, which the recipe omits.
- YieldA large batch, several dozen cookies from a 2-inch cutter. Cooled completely, they keep for a week or more in a tin and harden as they sit.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in the 1870s from recipes contributed by named housekeepers -- Mrs. G. Wyllie here -- and sold in aid of a hospital, a format that spread rapidly through North American cities and was widely imitated. Molasses cookies belong squarely to that world: molasses was an everyday sweetener for households that bought sugar sparingly, ginger was among the cheapest and most durable of the imported spices, and chemical leavening was by this point common in plain baking. Recipes of this kind rarely give a yield, a time or a temperature -- the instruction "flour enough to roll out thin" assumes a reader who already knew what the dough should feel like.