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Spice Cookies
1½ cupfuls brown sugar 1 cupful Crisco 1 cupful molasses ½ cupful sour milk 2 teaspoonfuls baking soda 1 teaspoonful salt 1 teaspoonful powdered cinnamon 1 teaspoonful powdered ginger 1 teaspoonful powdered cloves 1 teaspoonful grated nutmeg ½ teaspoonful black pepper ½ teaspoonful baking powder Flour to make a stiff dough Beat eggs five minutes, then add sugar and beat five minutes, then add Crisco and beat until thoroughly mixed, add molasses, milk, soda, salt, spices, baking powder, and enough flour to make stiff dough. Leave mixture in basin until following day. Take pieces of dough and roll out, cut with small cutter, lay on Criscoed tins and bake in moderate oven from seven to ten minutes.
Sufficient for ninety cookies.
Breads, etc.
A rolled molasses spice cookie of the old-fashioned sort, sharpened with black pepper and left to rest overnight. A few of the quantities as printed need interpreting before you start.
- The missing eggsThe method opens "Beat eggs five minutes" but no eggs appear in the ingredient list. Two eggs is consistent with a batch of this size (about 90 small cookies) and with comparable rolled molasses doughs of the period.
- Garbled fractionsSome of the "1½" figures may be ½ in the original setting: 1½ cups of sour milk against 1 cup of molasses would give a batter, not a stiff dough, and half a teaspoon each of black pepper and baking powder would also read sensibly. Treat the sour milk as ½ to ¾ cup and add flour to feel.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured raw milk, acidic enough to react with the soda. Use buttermilk, or milk soured with a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar per cup. Pasteurised milk left out simply spoils.
- CriscoAny solid vegetable shortening works, measured at room temperature so it creams. The 1913 product was hydrogenated cottonseed oil; if the dough seems slack, chill it.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350–375°F. Thin rolled cookies at that heat will be done in seven to ten minutes as stated — pull them when the edges set and the centres still look soft.
- The overnight restThe recipe directs it, and it helps: molasses doughs are sticky and awkward to roll when fresh, and a night in the cool firms the fat and hydrates the flour so the dough rolls thin without tearing.
- Rolling and cuttingRoll about ⅛ inch thick on a lightly floured board, working with a quarter of the dough at a time and keeping the rest cold. "Criscoed tins" means greased baking sheets; parchment is easier.
- The pepperBlack pepper in sweet baking is deliberate here, not a misprint — it belongs to the same family as pfeffernüsse and gives a late warmth behind the cloves and ginger.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil, cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, for Procter & Gamble, who had put the hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening on the market in 1911. The book's job was to prove that a manufactured fat could stand in for lard and butter in every department of the kitchen, so it works through familiar American recipes one by one with Crisco written into each — hence a plain spice cookie appearing in a promotional volume, and hence the instruction to grease the tins with the product too. The cookie itself is older than the shortening: molasses, sour milk and soda, and a full battery of ground spices including pepper, describe the cheap, keepable rolled cookie made in American households through the nineteenth century, when molasses was an everyday sweetener.