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Ginger Cookies (Boil together lightly one cup)
Boil together lightly one cup each of molasses, sugar and butter, or butter and lard mixed, and one teaspoonful ginger. When cool, add three well beaten eggs, one teaspoonful soda and a half teaspoonful salt. Mix soft.
A boiled-molasses cookie dough of the kind kept in a crock and rolled out over several days. The original omits the flour entirely, which is the first thing to settle.
- The missing flourNo quantity is given because the cook was expected to judge it. With one cup each of molasses, sugar and fat plus three eggs, expect roughly 5 to 6 cups of flour to reach a dough soft enough to roll but not sticky. Add it gradually and stop early — this dough firms considerably as it rests.
- "Mix soft" is the hingeMolasses doughs stiffen on standing and again on chilling. A dough that feels correct at the mixing bowl will roll like brick by morning, so err on the slack side and refrigerate an hour rather than compensating with more flour.
- Let it cool properlyThe molasses, sugar and butter come off the heat well above egg-coagulation temperature. "When cool" means genuinely lukewarm, near body temperature, or the three beaten eggs will curdle into threads through the batter.
- Boil "lightly"This is a brief boil to melt and combine, not a candy stage — a minute of bubbling is enough. Cooked further, the sugar concentrates and the finished cookies turn hard and brittle.
- Soda, not baking powderOne teaspoon of soda is the only leavener, and it works against the acid in the molasses. The original adds it with the eggs; in practice it is easier to whisk it into the flour, since dropped in as a lump it can leave bitter yellow-brown streaks.
- Butter and lardThe mixed-fat option was economy, but lard also gives a shorter, more tender cookie. Half butter and half lard or shortening still works; all butter spreads slightly more.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given. Roll thin, cut, and bake at 350°F for 8 to 10 minutes, until the edges are set and the centers still look faintly soft. Molasses browns fast and scorches without warning.
- YieldA generous batch by modern standards; rolled thin it should give several dozen cookies. The dough will keep some days refrigerated.
Boiled molasses cookies belong to a long American line of keeping cakes: hard, spicy, thin rounds of the sort that traveled in tins and lunch pails. Molasses was the cheap sweetener through much of the nineteenth century, and ginger was among the more commonly stocked spices, so the two together account for a great many everyday cookies of the period. Boiling the molasses, sugar and fat before mixing appears in a number of older recipes of this type; it dissolves the sugar completely. That the recipe gives no flour measurement and no oven temperature is equally characteristic of books of this kind, which assumed a cook who would judge dough by feel and oven heat by experience.