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Molasses Drop Cakes
One cup molasses, one cup sugar, one cup water, threequarter cupfuls butter and lard or all butter, one egg, one teaspoonful ginger, one teaspoonful soda, a little salt, five cupfuls flour; season with cinnamon.
This is an ingredient list rather than a method, which was normal in 1900 for a dough every cook already knew. The important decisions are all left to you, so here they are.
- The hinge: dough consistencyFive cups of flour to one cup of water plus a cup of molasses gives a soft, sticky drop dough, not a rolled gingerbread. Add the last cup of flour gradually and stop when the batter holds a mound on the spoon; flour of the period varied, so treat the five cups as an upper limit rather than a fixed quantity.
- Mixing orderCream the butter and lard with the sugar, beat in the egg and molasses, then add the dry ingredients alternately with the water. Dissolve the soda in a spoonful of the water first so it distributes evenly.
- Soda and molassesThe teaspoon of soda is there to neutralise the acid in the molasses, which is what makes these rise and brown. Use unsulphured dark molasses; blackstrap is far more bitter than what the book intended, and paler syrups carry less acid, so the soda has less to work against.
- "Butter and lard"Three-quarters of a cup total, split however you like. Lard gives a shorter, more tender crumb; all butter gives more flavour and a slightly crisper edge. Modern shortening works but tastes of nothing.
- "Season with cinnamon"Unquantified, as spicing often was. A teaspoon of ground cinnamon balances the teaspoon of ginger; a quarter teaspoon of cloves or allspice is within the period idiom.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven direction at all. A moderate oven, around 350F, suits a soft drop dough. Molasses and sugar together scorch quickly, so watch the bottoms rather than the tops.
- Timing and yieldDrop by rounded tablespoons two inches apart; 10 to 12 minutes, until the edges are set and the centres still look soft. This quantity makes roughly five dozen small cakes, which is a lot of dough for one household today — the dough halves cleanly, or refrigerates for two days.
- "Cakes"In this period a drop cake is what we would call a soft cookie. Expect a cakey, domed result rather than a snap.
Molasses was the cheap sweetener of nineteenth-century American baking, and drop cakes like these belong to the long stretch when a barrel of molasses sat in the cellar and white sugar was bought by the pound. The recipe's structure — cup, cup, cup, then flour to suit — is a survival of the older oral tradition of measuring by the teacup and judging the rest by hand, and it shows how much such a cookbook still assumed of its reader. The pairing of soda with an acidic sweetener predates commercial baking powder and remained standard in molasses doughs long after powder was available, because the reaction browns and softens the crumb as well as lifting it. A plain spiced cookie, made in the dozens and kept in a tin, counted as something to offer a caller.