Recipe of the Month! Librarians in the Kitchen: Baking 19th Century Cookies from Scratch
In Special Collections, our books don’t leave the building, but sometimes the recipes sneak out for a trip to the kitchen. Last week, the U-M Library Art Alliance (a staff interest group), the William L. Clements Library, and the Special Collections Research Center teamed up with Student Life Sustainability for a small, hands-on staff event, where we brought two nineteenth century cookie recipes to 21st century tastebuds.
For this historical cooking experience, we prepared a recipe titled simply “Cookies” from the Washington Sarah Dunkin Washington Cookery and Confectionary Book from the William L. Clements Library, and a “Ginger Cake” recipe from Dr. Chase's recipes; or, Information for everybody… in the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive. For December’s Recipe of the Month, I’ll focus on Dr. Chase’s Ginger Cake, which in modern parlance is not a cake at all, but much closer to what we could call a cookie.
Ginger Cake - Molasses 2 cups; butter, or one-half lard if you choose 1 ½ cups; sour milk 2 cups; ground ginger 1 teaspoon; saleratus 1 heaping tea-spoon.
Mash the saleratus, then mix all these ingredients together in a suitable pan, and stir in flour as long as you can with a spoon, then take the hand and work in more, just so you can roll them by using flour dusting pretty freely; roll out thin, cut and lay upon your buttered or floured tins; then mix one spoon of molasses and two of water, and with a small brush or a bit of cloth wet over the top of the cakes; this removes the dry flour, causes the cakes to take a nice brown and keep them moist; put into a quick oven; and ten minutes will bake them if the oven is sufficiently hot. Do not dry them all up, but take out as soon as nicely browned.
The most notable thing about Dr. Chase’s gingerbread cookies is that there is no additional sweetener besides the molasses, reflecting the fact that in 1860s Michigan, sugar was still a luxury for many people. Compared to modern cookies, these taste barely sweet - almost savory - with a dry texture that makes them more like a thick, soft cracker or a thin biscuit than a cookie. Reactions from our fellow library staff varied from “This is awful and I need to get this taste out of my mouth!” to “These are amazing and I am obsessed!” Consider adding these to your holiday cookie rotation and see for yourself what your reaction will be!
