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Ginger Cookies (One cupful of sugar one cupful)
One cupful of sugar, one cupful of molasses, one cupful of butter, or half butter and half lard; mix well together and let them come to a boil. When cool add two eggs, one tablespoonful of ginger, one teaspoonful of baking soda, six cupfuls of flour, knead; roll thin. Bake in a slow oven.
A rolled ginger cookie built on the boiled molasses-and-fat method, which produces a firm, snappy dough rather than a soft drop cookie. Two instructions carry the whole recipe: cool the syrup before the eggs go in, and roll genuinely thin.
- Cool it properlyThe boiled sugar, molasses and butter will be at or above the boil, and eggs stirred into it will scramble into threads. Let the mixture drop to lukewarm, as the recipe directs, before beating in the eggs.
- "A slow oven"Read this as 300-325F. Molasses and sugar at this proportion scorch quickly, and a low oven lets thin cookies dry to a snap without the edges blackening.
- Baking timeNone is given. Rolled thin, these need roughly 8-12 minutes at 325F; pull them when the surface looks dry and set, since they firm considerably as they cool.
- The flour is a target, not a ruleSix cupfuls with modern all-purpose flour is on the generous side, and period cups and flours varied. Add the last cup gradually and stop when the dough is stiff enough to roll without sticking.
- "Knead" means work the dough brieflyThis is a stiff cookie paste, not bread. Work it on a floured board only until smooth and cohesive; chilling it an hour makes thin rolling much easier.
- Soda without cream of tartarThe molasses supplies the acid the baking soda reacts with, which is why no other leavening appears. Use plain baking soda; baking powder here will change both the rise and the flavor.
- Half butter, half lardThe recipe offers the substitution without comment; lard would have been the cheaper fat. A good rendered lard gives a crisper, shorter cookie; all butter gives more flavor and slightly more spread.
- GingerA tablespoonful of ground ginger sounds like a lot and is not, in six cups of flour. Use fresh, fragrant ground ginger, since jars more than a year old will taste dusty and flat.
- YieldThis is a large batch; six cupfuls of flour rolled thin and cut at about two inches will give many dozens of cookies. It halves cleanly if that is more than you want.
Boiled molasses cookies of this type were standard American household baking through the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, when molasses was still cheaper than refined sugar and kept well in the pantry. The technique -- heating fat, sugar and molasses together before mixing -- belongs to the same family as gingerbread and the hard "ginger snap," and it produces a dough sturdy enough to roll, cut and store in a tin, which is much of why such recipes persisted.