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Ginger Cookies (One cupful of sugar one cupful) (II)
One cupful of sugar, one cupful of butter, one cupful of molasses, one-third cupful of vinegar, one teaspoonful of soda, one teaspoonful of salt, one tablespoonful of ginger, one egg; flour to thicken; rub butter and sugar together; add egg well beaten and salt and ginger; stir all together until smooth; dissolve soda in vinegar; stir the vinegar into the molasses; add the liquid to the other mixture; beat well, add sufficient flour, roll thin. Bake in a quick oven.
A large old-fashioned rolled ginger cookie, leavened by soda reacting with vinegar and molasses. The recipe assumes a cook who knows what a stiff rolling dough feels like, so the flour is left open.
- "Flour to thicken"Expect roughly 5 to 6 cups of all-purpose flour for a dough firm enough to roll at 1/8 inch. Add it a cup at a time and stop when the dough is no longer tacky; too much makes the cookies dry and hard rather than crisp.
- Chill before rollingWith a full cup of butter and a cup of molasses, the dough is slack at room temperature. An hour in the refrigerator makes thin rolling possible and keeps the cut shapes from spreading.
- A quick ovenAbout 400 to 425F. Thin ginger cookies at that heat are done in roughly 5 to 8 minutes, and molasses darkens to bitterness very quickly, so watch the first tray and time the rest by it.
- The soda and vinegarDissolving the soda in vinegar and stirring that into the molasses gives an immediate, vigorous fizz. Combine and mix straight away rather than letting the batter stand, or much of the lift is lost before the flour goes in.
- Butter and saltA cup of butter is 8 ounces, two sticks. The full teaspoon of salt suits unsalted butter; with salted butter, cut it to half a teaspoon.
- MolassesUse unsulphured light or dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is far more bitter than the table molasses a 1900 kitchen kept on hand.
- GingerA tablespoon of ground ginger is correct and not a misprint; these are meant to be sharply spiced. Ground ginger loses its heat within a year or so, so old jar spice will read as flat.
- YieldAbout 5 to 6 dozen cookies at 2 1/2 inches, depending on how thin you roll. The dough keeps in the refrigerator for several days and rolls better on the second.
Rolled molasses-and-ginger cookies were among the most common sweets in nineteenth-century American households, for the good reason that their ingredients were the cheap ones: molasses rather than refined sugar, and ginger, which was one of the few spices affordable in quantity. The vinegar here is doing chemical work, not flavoring - baking soda needs an acid to release its gas, and while the molasses supplies some, a third of a cup of vinegar guarantees the reaction. Commercial baking powder was widely available by 1900, but recipes like this one kept the older soda-and-acid method that cooks trusted.