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August 19
Menu: Vegetarian; Cream of Turnip Soup; Risotto; Asparagus Salad; Coffee Souffle; Ginger Crisps; Iced Tea Ginger Crisps-Cream 1/2 cup Crisco with 1/2 cup sugar, add 1 cup molasses, 1 teaspoon each of cinnamon and nutmeg, 1 teaspoon salt, 2 teaspoons baking powder, and flour to make stiffish dough. Roll thin, cut out with cutter and bake in quick oven.
A one-line molasses cookie from the dated menu calendar at the back of the Crisco book. The dough is soft when mixed and firms up in the cold, which is the key to rolling it thin.
- The missing gingerDespite the name, no ginger appears in the ingredient list — cinnamon and nutmeg only. Add 1 to 2 teaspoons ground ginger if you want the cookie the title promises; the spicing otherwise reads as a plain molasses crisp.
- "Flour to make stiffish dough"This is the one genuinely open measurement. Expect roughly 3 1/2 to 4 cups of all-purpose flour for this quantity of fat and molasses, added a half cup at a time until the dough pulls away from the bowl and holds a ball.
- Chill before rollingChilling -- The recipe says nothing about it, but molasses dough at room temperature can be hard to roll thin without tearing or sticking. If it resists, wrap and refrigerate before rolling to about 1/8 inch, and work with a quarter of the dough at a time.
- Quick ovenRoughly 400-425F. Thin molasses cookies at that heat need only about 5 to 7 minutes and will scorch at the edges quickly, since molasses browns faster than sugar alone. Watch the first tray and adjust.
- CriscoModern all-vegetable shortening substitutes directly by volume. The original was hydrogenated cottonseed oil; butter also works but spreads more and browns sooner.
- Salt and leaveningA full teaspoon of salt is right for shortening, which is unsalted. Two teaspoons of baking powder in molasses dough gives a light, snappy crisp; there is no need to increase it.
- YieldAbout 5 to 6 dozen 2-inch cookies. They crisp as they cool and keep well for a week in a tin.
The Story of Crisco (1913), written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, was published to teach American cooks what to do with a fat that had no precedent in their kitchens: Crisco, introduced in 1911, was hydrogenated cottonseed oil sold as a substitute for both lard and butter. Rolled molasses crisps were an obvious showcase: molasses cookies were long-established household baking, cheap and durable, and the recipe's brevity assumes a cook who already knew how thin to roll and how a stiff dough should feel.