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.