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Molasses Drop Cookies
One cup each of butter, molasses, brown sugar and sour milk, one teaspoonful of soda dissolved in a little boiling water, one teaspoonful each of cinnamon and ginger; beat the eggs light, and after stirring butter, sugar, spices, and molasses together, add eggs and other ingredients together with four cups of flour. Drop on a tin a try cake and if not quite thick enough, add a little more flour. Beat well, drop on tins and bake in a quick oven.
A soft, cake-like molasses drop cookie of the sour-milk-and-soda school. The recipe as printed has one real gap and one instruction worth taking literally.
- The eggs are never countedThe text says "beat the eggs light" without ever listing them. Comparable molasses drop recipes of the period use two or three; the quantity here is genuinely missing rather than implied, so treat it as a judgement call and lean toward two.
- Test-bake first, as instructed"Drop on a tin a try cake" means bake a single trial cookie and see whether it holds its shape. This is the hinge of the recipe: with a cup each of butter, molasses, sugar and sour milk against four cups of flour, the batter runs, and the original expects you to add flour until it does not.
- Sour milkNot spoiled milk but naturally soured raw milk, acidic enough to react with the soda. Use buttermilk cup for cup, or a cup of milk with a tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice stirred in and left ten minutes.
- Soda in boiling waterThe recipe dissolves the soda before it goes in, a common step in sour-milk recipes and usually explained as a way to distribute it evenly and avoid bitter spots in the finished cookie. "A little" is best read as a tablespoon or two, no more, or you thin the batter further.
- A quick ovenUsually glossed today as somewhere around 400-425F, though the book gives no temperature and period ovens were judged by hand rather than thermometer. That is hot for a molasses dough, which is sugar-heavy and browns fast; on a modern sheet pan in a modern oven, expect the edges to darken well before the centres set. Watching them closely is more useful than trusting the word.
- MolassesPeriod molasses was ordinary table molasses, not blackstrap. Blackstrap is far more bitter and mineral and will overwhelm the cinnamon and ginger.
- YieldNot given. This is a large batch by modern standards, on the order of five to six dozen cookies from about four cups of flour and a cup of fat.
Sour milk and saleratus baking defined American home cookery through the nineteenth century: dairying households always had milk turning, and soda was cheap and reliable long before commercial baking powder became universal. Molasses played the same double role, sweetening and softening a dough at a fraction of the cost of refined white sugar, which is why so many nineteenth-century cookie recipes are brown rather than pale. The instruction to bake a single "try cake" before committing the batch is the mark of a book written when flour absorbency varied from sack to sack and no cook expected a printed measurement to be final.