Soft Molasses Cookies: or, Delicious and exquisite

Every word in the recipe title made me want these cookies more.

Soft Molasses Cookies 1 cup shortening 1 cup molasses 1 tbsp. vinegar ½ level tsp. baking powder 1 level tsp. salt ½ tsp. cloves or allspice 1 cup sugar 1 egg 5 tbsp. cold coffee or water 3 cups flour 1 tsp. soda 1 tsp. ginger Heat oven to 350°. Have greased or paper-lined baking sheets ready. Beat the shortening in a large bowl until very soft and creamy. Add the sugar gradually, then cream well. Add the egg and beat until light. Then mix in the molasses, vinegar and coffee. Mix and sift all the dry ingredients into the liquid. Add more flour if necessary to make a very soft dough that pulls away from the side of the bowl when you stir it. Bake until darkened around the edges, about 15 minutes. Source: Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933, via The Internet Archive

I know I've said this before, but I really love molasses. I even pour it right onto waffles. I noticed this recipe the first time I flipped through my copy of this book, and it has held my attention ever since.  

Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933

The recipe starts with shortening and sugar. Because shortening seems like an act of sacrilege against nature, I was going to use butter instead. But as some lovely commenters pointed out in an earlier recipe, shortening has a higher melting point, which affects how the cookies spread. So I stuck with the recipe. Hopefully using shortening means the cookies don't have as much of a chance to melt into dough puddles before they start setting up.

I never planned to get good at dividing an egg in half, but it has proven a wonderful way to economize. Even if we weren't trying to keep the grocery budget well-trimmed, splitting eggs lets me try a new cookie recipe without committing to make, like, six dozen of them. 

At this point, the recipe calls for "cold coffee or water." I imagine that a lot of people would have simply poured in the last of the coffee from earlier that day. But since no one in the house drinks coffee, we don't have a coffee pot stationed on the countertop, much less one with a bit of coffee sitting in the bottom of it and waiting for a rinse. So, I made an iced coffee to Book of Cookrye standards just to save out this tiny little splash of it.

Soon it was time to bring on the molasses. Look at this tar-slick of exquisite flavor!

My faith in the recipe wavered as I started stirring and shortening curdled in the molasses. As we have learned, one should be wary when your cookie dough curdles.

I put the sticky mess aside to deal with the dry ingredients. For a recipe that doesn't mention spices in the title, Mrs. Mary Martensen uses a lot of them. These are measured exactly as written-- I didn't even do "heaping" or "generous" teaspoons. With that in mind, the spices covered up a lot of the flour, didn't they?

We ended up with a really thick batter than a dough, but I decided to bake it anyway. As I told myself at the time, You don't know how a recipe is supposed to go until you make it.

Although I've always had good results from this book, I've had very hit-or-miss results with my cookies. They always seem to go flat without extra flour. So, I carefully put a single dough plop onto the pan. I wanted to make sure things were going right. Baking cookies one at a time often feels like a waste of oven heat, but it prevents throwing out panfuls of failure.

After our first cookie melted into a puddle and cooled into a brown rock, I got out the bowl and added more flour until the dough started pulling away from the sides as I stirred. That seemed like a favorable sign, so I baked some more cookies just to see how our dough was feeling. And wouldn't you know it, they came out just right!

Based on how the cookies came out, the extra flour made the dough exactly how it should be. It was really sticky, but barely firm enough to shape into balls with my hands if I wanted the cookies to look neater. But I don't think shaping the cookies into nice balls is worth the bother. They come out the same as if you drop them from a spoon, just a little more wrinkly on top. But even if you put the spoon-dropped and the hand-shaped cookies side by side, it's hard to tell the difference.

As is often the case with anything gingerbread-adjacent, these cookies needed to ripen overnight before they tasted good. They were bland when they came out of the oven, but the spice flavor was a lot stronger after a full night of rest. The coffee added a nice undertone to the flavor, but they would still be delicious without it. And they had a perfect soft texture. They also stayed soft for several days. This tells me that they're perfect to keep on hand. Instead of immediately going stale, they'll be a lovely, reassuring presence in the kitchen.

 

Do not make the apricot brandypud!

Don't try this at home.

When last we saw the raisin butterscotch pudding, some lovely people suggested that we try using dried apricots, and also adding brandy to the sauce. Which sounds good enough to make, but I didn't think my method through very well.

My thought process was quite simple: Replace some of the water that you pour over the batter with brandy. As it happens, this bottle of conveniently flavor-matched apricot brandy happened to be in the cabinet. I don't know how long it's been there, but it hasn't been uncapped since the last time I made a honey fruit pie.

Yes, it is empty now. And yes, that is foreshadowing.

Let's start with the things that that went right. Our chopped apricots looked unexpectedly pretty when I dropped them onto the batter. Incidentally, it turns out that a six-ounce package of dried apricots yields about the ⅔ cup of raisins that the original recipe calls for.

After I mixed the apricots in, I couldn't thinking this looks like one of those salad recipes that ends with the direction "Stir in the marshmallows and refrigerate until dissolved."

As we noted when we made this as written, this recipe goes by really fast. This means we wasted very little time getting to the fire hazards. You see, we had about a half-pint of brandy left in the bottle. (For our metric friends, that's a scant quarter-liter.) Partially to eliminate a shelf-sitting bottle and partially as a nod to the fact that "the relatives from Chicago" were reportedly the very schnockered type of Irish, I poured all of the brandy into the sauce. Also, I had just read a few articles about "tipsy cake" and thought the name was too whimsical to pass up.

Here I had my first warning thoughts about what was going on. The recipe calls for hot water, and putting a lot of liquor in the microwave didn't seem wise. I heated the heavily brandied water on the stove instead, where the vapors had plenty of room to dissipate. I may have been a worrywart, but our microwave remains undamaged. Also, I took this opportunity to put the lemon rind in the pot to better draw its flavor. This was one of the last happy moments before I realized what danger I had just stirred my way into.

After getting the brandy-water into the cake pan, things looked almost normal. I closed the oven, set the timer, and was really excited about our boozy adventure for a few very short minutes. Then I had an awful realization: A lot of the alcohol was going to cook out of this, and the flammable vapors in the oven had nowhere to dissipate to. 

I tried to tell myself that I've made a lot of rum cakes without incident, but none of those involve putting a half-pint of liquor in a hot oven. Before long, I had terrible visions of the alcohol vapors making their way to the red-hot baking coil, leading to something like this:

And so, thanking every available god that no one else was in the house, I kept going to the oven and vigorously flapping the door every few minutes to dispel the fumes. The first time I did that, I got ever-so-slightly dizzy from inhaling so much alcohol. (Or maybe I was imagining that in my worried state of mind.) I don't know if this would have been just fine and I was scaring myself for nothing. But I would like to proudly point out that at the end of the recipe, the oven remained unexploded.

Amid all the angst, the brandied sauce filtered down to the bottom of the pan, just as the non-alcoholic version does. But then it erupted into little bubbling geysers as the baking time wore on. It left the cake perforated with tunnels and holes. 

After most of the sauce boiled away, what remained reminded me of of what sits on a pineapple upside-down cake after you flip it out of the pan.

I tried some of this as soon as it cooled off. It was like doing shots with dessert. Seriously, the alcohol nearly burned. The flavors almost fit together, but this was the first time I've wanted a chaser after a cake.

But with that said, it occurred to me that perhaps some whipped cream was just what this needed. These days, I keep a pint of cream on hand because a lot of recipes call for the occasional splash or spoonful. It took nearly no time at all to make this happen:

I hate how good this was. Like, you could serve it at a wedding. I don't know what sort of magic happened, but the whipped cream on top made united everything below it. I never would have expected such ecstasy from a hasty recipe that had threatened to blow up the kitchen. It's delicious. It is exquisite. I would actually pay for it at restaurants.

And so, in conclusion, I don't think anyone should make this. (You'll note that I didn't even put a recipe on top because I care about all of you.) Just because you have a fire extinguisher in your kitchen doesn't mean you should use it.

But the fault here is with how I did this, not with the idea of an apricot-brandy pudding cake. And the flavor combination is just so good. I'm already thinking about how to make it in ways that don't involve nearly blowing up the kitchen. Perhaps make the apricots-and-brandy sauce on the stove and serve it with the cake?

Applesauce Meringue: Low effort, and not that bad

Ever want to make dessert without putting in the effort?

Applesauce Meringue 2 eggs, separated 2 cups applesauce Sugar to taste 3 tbsp powdered sugar (for meringue) Heat oven to 350°. Grease a small baking dish. (Like, a really small one. I used a round pan about 5 inches across.) Beat the egg yolks in a medium or large mixing bowl. Mix in the applesauce, and add sugar to taste. Pour into the baking dish and bake 15 minutes. When the baking time is almost over, beat the egg whites until frothy. Gradually add the powdered sugar, beating all the time. Then continue beating until the mixture forms stiff peaks. After the applesauce has baked 15 minutes, remove it from the oven and carefully spread the meringue on top. Bake for another 15 minutes, then allow to cool completely. Undated newspaper clipping, Chicago area (probably 1930s or 1940s)

Today we are revisiting my great-grandmother's cooking notebook. I get the impression that this recipe was made for those days when you feel fundamentally done with cooking but still want dessert. It also looks perfect for those who are short on both money and time (and keep in mind this was probably printed in the 1930s). 

 

That's barely legible, isn't it? It was a little better in person, if not by very much. But if we really mess with color filters, we can make it almost easy to read.

And so, we begin by putting egg yolks into applesauce. Of course, egg yolks are a pretty standard way to thicken custards. But I almost got the impression that we're only adding them here because we already cracked the egg whites for the meringue. After all, it's hard to justify throwing out eggs in any era.

The recipe says to add two cups of "sweetened applesauce." I don't know if they meant to purchase sweetened applesauce, or if they were implying to add your own sugar without wasting any column-inches on extra words. Our applesauce was factory-sweetened but a bit bland, so I stirred in about two tablespoons of sugar to help it along.

If this recipe didn't involve making a meringue, I would have called this a Hump-Day Quickie. We had it in a baking dish only three minutes after our egg yolks landed in the mixing bowl. 

After the prescribed fifteen minutes, our apple custard hadn't set. I would have baked it longer, but I don't know if two egg yolks were up to the task of setting an entire pint of applesauce. They might only serve to make the dessert "richer" in some undefined way. So I got the meringue on top of it as best I could without mixing the two together. I didn't have an aesthetic triumph, but it's kind of silly to get hung up on presentation when the recipe was supposed to be simple.

Really, the meringue is the only part of this recipe that takes more than a minute. But hand-cranked eggbeaters had already gotten cheap by the time this recipe was printed. So even if you couldn't afford the monthly payment on an electric mixer (or if the electricity in your city was either unreliable or absent), this wasn't an hourlong ordeal with a whisk. And I can't imagine the newspaper's recipe writers having someone hand-whisk a meringue only to spread it on applesauce.

Of course, I didn't turn on the oven just for this little bowl. But that's another advantage of the recipe: if you're baking your dinner, you can easily find room on the rack for dessert. Of course, as often happens when I economize on oven heat, the tiny pan took longer to bake than everything else. I tried and halfway succeeded to convince myself that it's not too horrible a waste of heat if I simply leave the oven on for a few minutes after dinner is ready.

The meringue puffed up beautifully in the oven. At first I was absolutely delighted, then I realized that every time they rise like that, they always fall back down. But for a short half-minute, our dessert had a golden, airy dome on top.

Sure enough, the meringue deflated only a few minutes after it left the oven. Even though I made sure it made contact with the pan all the way around the side, it ripped off and shrank away. I could have gotten dismayed about this, but instead I told myself that 1: this is supposed to be "a simple dessert" (their words) and 2: there is no point in fretting over barely-modified applesauce.

After our simple dessert had cooled off, I put it in the refrigerator. I can't imagine anyone liking warm applesauce for dessert.

I almost want to say this is bad, but it's more like... exactly what you think it is. I was going to throw it out, but then I was like "Hmm... I actually kinda like it." And even though applesauce never excites me, this was really nice with lunch on a hot day. I wouldn't go out of my way to make it again, but I wouldn't mind sliding it into the oven if I was already baking something.

Corn Tortillas: or, Sometimes good things are waiting next to the street

Hooray for free things!

Corn Tortillas 2 cups corn masa 1½ cups water Mix the masa and water, stirring for 2 minutes. You should have a soft dough that doesn't stick to the hands. If it's dry and crumbly, mix in more water, one teaspoon at a time. Divide the dough into balls that weigh about 1 ounce each (about the size of ping-pong balls). Place a griddle or frying pan over medium-high heat. Put two sheets of thick plastic inside a tortilla press. If you don't have thick plastic wrap, you can cut off the sides of a gallon-sized ziploc bag. Place a dough ball between the plastic sheets and press it thin (about 5 inches in diameter). Lightly grease the pan, or spritz it with cooking spray. Carefully peel the tortilla off the plastic and cook it for two minutes, turning it every thirty seconds or so. As you're cooking, re-grease the pan whenever they start to stick, usually after every 3 or 4 tortillas. Source: Instructions on the back of Maseca corn masa

I finally own a tortilla press! My mother has her grandmother's. While she always lets us use it, it's one of the few things she will not let anyone take away from the house. I've been wanting my own for a while, but I've always felt that it is invalid to just buy a tortilla press. For reasons I can't explain, I think they are supposed to find you. 

I tried to speed up this process by asking various friends traveling to Mexico to bring one back with them (never mind that the supermarket I go to every week has them for a nearly forgettable price). But for some reason, no one wanted to do my shopping while they were taking baggage across international borders.

But a few nights ago when I was taking an evening walk, I passed a house with a folding table of stuff in the front yard with a sign that said FREE. I had no need for any of the slow cookers (they had an entire potluck's worth of them), but I found this. 

IT FINALLY HAPPENED!

 

Today we are making my mother's recipe for corn tortillas. By that I mean when I asked how to make them, she told me to just follow the directions on the bag. (Incidentally, this was also her answer when I asked how to make white rice.) I do like that since corn tortillas only contain corn flour and water, you don't need to worry about the dough toughening if you stir it too much. Or at least, things won't go awry unless you really overbeat it.

Now, the directions on the bag say to stir for two minutes. It turns out that when you first mix the cornmeal and water, they become a sort of slurry. But as you keep stirring, the cornmeal absorbs more of the water. After about two minutes, the former gritty sludge almost has the consistency of Play-Doh.

Now that our dough is ready, we are supposed to put sheets of heavy plastic into the press. Plastic wrap really won't work for this. Even if you can get it to stop sticking to itself, it is too flimsy. But if you (like most of us) don't keep food-grade acetate around the house, a gallon bag will work just fine after you cut off the top and sides. 

 

I actually learned that from Mom. I thought it was a shortcut she started doing to avoid having to deep-clean the press every single time. Then she told me over the phone that now that I have my own press, it's so much easier if I cut up a bag just like her grandmother did. So this is an heirloom cooking tip!

The directions tell us to roll these into one-ounce balls. I got out the scale for this, and it turns out that one ounce of dough is about the size of a ping-pong ball. So for those who don't have a kitchen scale at hand, now you know. 

The rest of this recipe is simple: place a dough ball on press, squish it down, then put it on a frying pan. I was unnerved at how perfectly round this came out. 

 

My great-grandmother's tortillas always came out in flawless circles. Up until now, mine always came out looking like each of the 50 states. Perhaps this is why this press found me. If I had just bought a press like a normal person, I might have ended up with amoebas instead of circles.

I should note that the tortillas are a bit tricky to get off of the plastic without ripping them. It's easier to take the whole dough-laden plastic, place it dough-side-down on your open hand, and then peel the plastic away.

I hate giving recipes that involve specialized supplies, so I really wanted to write that you don't need a tortilla press for these. I wanted to write that you can put the dough between two sheets of plastic and then press it with a heavy book or some other flat object. Or, I wanted to write that you can smash them flat with a two-handled pot, or use a rolling pin-- because even people who don't have a rolling pin can find some object that will suit the purpose. I tried every alternative I could think of, and none of them worked. But if you don't have quasi-spiritual views against buying tortilla presses, they're fairly inexpensive.

If you've only ever bought pre-packaged corn tortillas, you have no idea what you're missing. It's like tasting fresh vegetables when you've only had them canned. And if you don't have weird superstitions about how to get kitchen implements, tortilla presses are pretty easy to get. I see them on the pans-and-whisks aisle in most of the stores I go to. I won't say you owe it to yourself to learn about what you've missed, but I do think it's impossible to be happy with pre-packaged ones ever again.

Chocolate Chunk Cookies: or, Don't natter on about "hydrating my flour" ever again

I would like to file a grievance with chocolate chip cookie recipes.

Chocolate Chunk Cookies ½ cup shortening ½ cup butter ¾ cup brown sugar ¾ cup white sugar ½ tsp salt ½ tsp baking soda 1 tsp vanilla 2 eggs 2 cups flour 8 oz semisweet chocolate, chopped (or 1⅓ cups chocolate chips) 1 cup sliced nuts, if desired Heat oven to 375°. Have greased or paper-lined cookie sheets ready. Cream the shortening, butter, sugars, salt, and baking soda. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each. Beat until light and fluffy. Sift in the flour and mix in. Then stir in the chocolate.

This recipe comes out of my great-grandmother's binder. It's nice to know that chocolate chip cookies made their way into my great-grandmother's household. This recipe (which looks like she cut it out of a book) might actually be older than chocolate chips themselves. I haven't checked this, but I'm pretty sure chocolate chips were invented for the cookies. Can we talk about how a single cookie recipe literally created an entirely new type of chocolate factory?

I have made a lot of chocolate chip cookies using multiple recipes. Every time, without fail, they have bake into sad runny splats unless I add a lot of extra flour. But this recipe's has that crisp, self-assured tone that one finds in home economics textbooks from the era when no girl could graduate high school without mastering biscuits and white sauce.

Also, we found this in a personal recipe binder. Let's set aside aside the fact this happens to be my great-grandmother's recipes. Even if I found it in some random person's notebook that ended up at an antique store with a $1.50 price tag, someone cut this out and saved it. This was not in some slapped-together advertising pamphlet with a title like Gourmet Baking with Schwenk's Lard. People don't keep dud recipes... right?

The recipe starts out with half shortening and half butter. Even though shortening creeps me out with its utter defiance of nature, it was nice to know that these cookies would not fall victim to the ongoing butter moisture crisis. Also, as some helpful commenters noted in a previous recipe, shortening has a higher melting point than butter. So in theory, these cookies wouldn't become a runny mess. Or at least, they were less likely to.

Even after detouring to actually sift the flour instead of dumping it in like all those lesser people (I am those lesser people), these cookies came together really quickly. After I had finished mixing everything, I remembered to add the baking soda. I had dissolved it in--- hang on a minute. This recipe has us adding a lot of water to the dough here. Two tablespoons may sound like a forgettable amount when you're reading the directions, but it's a lot when you dump it into the bowl.

For our metric friends, we're adding 3 centiliters (give or take a few numbers on the right-hand side of the decimal point). I told myself this recipe must have worked for someone at some point. I didn't want to think that my great-grandmother made terrible chocolate chip cookies and no one ever told her.

The finished cookie dough seemed a little too floppy to come out right. But if we go back to our recipe, it says to "add sifted dry ingredients, mix to a smooth batter." Well, the recipe writers call this a batter, and it looked like one. But I still put a single test cookie into the oven before risking an entire panful of dough. Great-grandmothers or authoritative-sounding directions are favorable signs but not guarantees.

The cookie came out just as bad as every other chocolate chip cookie I have ever made. 

I know it looks partially incinerated, but I took out when slightly underbaked just like the recipe says. 

I didn't bother waiting to see if the cookie improved as it cooled off. Instead, I stirred more flour into the remaining dough, put another test plop onto a pan, and got a cookie that was... well... slightly better.

As glad as I was to avoid wasting the dough, I was not exactly wild about running a hot oven for nearly half an hour only to throw three failed cookies into the trash one at a time. 

And so, I decided these were good enough. The air conditioning had already endured enough. I baked the rest of the dough and hoped the cookies would seem better the next day. And... well, I didn't throw them away, but I wasn't happy that I made them.

I was going to throw these out, but someone else in the house put a hand over the plate and said "No no. Don't take these away." So despite all my grousing about faulty recipes (and I'm not done yet), these may have been exactly right. Maybe I just don't have good taste in chocolate chip cookies. But I could not convince myself that chocolate chip cookies are supposed to be slightly greasy dough splats.

A long time ago I found a book called Twinkie, Deconstructed. Each chapter is about an ingredient in Twinkies, where it comes from, and how it is produced. The table of contents is basically the ingredient list you'll find on the nutrition label. The author even visited the mines that yield the minerals involved in producing baking soda. But the biggest revelation for me wasn't that food production is a complex and delicate operation. It was that you can't always obey the measurements in a recipe.

The people in charge of Twinkie factories have to change the recipe every day (if not multiple times a day) to compensate for variations in humidity, inconsistent ingredients, and so on. (Does today's flour have more protein in it than yesterday's? Are the eggs firmer than the last batch? Has the humidity changed?) I hardly need to point out that a Twinkie factory is one of the most regimented food production sites on Earth. If the people who have literally reduced baking to a mathematical operation still have to tweak their recipe, the rest of us baking at home do too.

And sometimes, you just have a bad recipe, even if it's from an otherwise trustworthy source. If you watch a lot of older cooking shows, you'll often see them say "I saw a recipe for ________ in a magazine that was almost correct, but they forgot a very important step that would ruin everything!" (Fanny Cradock did this a lot.) Julia Child noted in interviews that she took so long to learn to cook partly because she kept trying to make recipes that absolutely could not work as written, and she was too inexperienced to know it wasn't her fault. Even serious, professional food historians sometimes struggle with recipes that made it to the printing press instead of merely being scribbled in someone's notes. And of course, even recipes in modern-day books do not always work as printed. 

Having said all that, I hadn't expected this recipe to fail so hard. You don't usually find duds carefully pasted into someone's notes. (Although you sometimes do!) I started to wonder if my great-grandmother made a mental corrective note instead of writing it on the page. 

Or, maybe people were better at preemptively fixing recipes back then. After all, most people today still know that you should check the oven a little early instead of setting a timer and never checking the oven. I really hope my great-grandmother didn't follow this recipe and make several years of really bad chocolate chip cookies.

A few days later, I decided to try and get this recipe to work correctly. I know there are plenty of reliable chocolate chip cookie recipes out there, but this one had offended me. First, I axed the water that I was supposed to dissolve the baking soda in. Our runny dough did not need any more water in it. Next, I thought that perhaps the dough needed to refrigerate overnight so the flour could soak up some of the water. (Or, if you prefer, the flour "absorbed additional moisture content" or "more thoroughly hydrated.")

The dough was a lot firmer when I got it out of the refrigerator the next day. It almost bent the spoon when I scooped it onto the baking sheet. In a moment of extravagant daring, I baked an entire pan of cookies instead of baking just one of them to make sure. Here's how that went:

"Refrigerate your dough to let the flour hydrate overnight!" they said.

So, the recipe said they will become crisp as they cool. And I suppose they hardened up a little bit.

All right, I know that there are a lot of cookies that are supposed to spread out until they're practically melted. And I know that a lot of people like crispy, thin chocolate chip cookies. But I cannot accept that today's recipe is supposed to look like this. You could squeeze the grease out of them with your fist. 

I yanked the flour down from the shelf and shook a lot of it into the dough. As you can see, we aren't carefully tweaking it one spoonful at a time.

When you practically double one of the main ingredients in a recipe, you usually ruin it. But I forced the flour into the dough with my angry bare hands, and the cookies came out perfect.

I have to say, having made some substantial revisions to the recipe, these cookies were really, really amazing. These were the best chocolate chip cookies I've ever made. I'm going to charitably assume that my great-grandmother made cookies like this instead of blindly baking several years of pan-splats. 

Or who knows, maybe wheat has changed a lot. Perhaps the recipe would work if I somehow got my hands on some cryogenically-stored 1930s flour.

After making them again (because we always want to re-test recipes when they're delicious ), I wanted to have just the cookie without the chocolate chips. And so, I baked about half of the dough before adding chocolate to the rest. These were some of the best drop cookies I've ever made. 

So, the chocolate chips in this recipe aren't disguising lousy cookies. They are improving what's already so good. They're soft without being doughy, firm without being hard, and all-around swell. I'm definitely going to make these again.