Ok so this is totally cheating. I haven't actually made these cookies myself...at least solo. But in light of my grandma passing and some requests from my family I know I need to post about this particular recipe but I just don't have time to make them with the chaos of Christmas. Maybe in January or maybe when my children are bigger.
I come from a line of strong and sassy but absolutely wonderful women who are fiercely loyal to their families. There is lore in my family of a woman who sent her husband off to the back forty in the morning to work and when he returned that night he found that his wife had given birth to a baby, cleaned the entire house and had dinner on the table waiting for him. Another story about an ancestor who would knit in her sleep and only wake up if she dropped a stitch.( My mom tells me these are actual stories about my Great great great grandmother Eliza Jane Ayerst- Wow!) But fantastical stories aside I have amazing grandmothers dating beyond my own grandmothers. One of those women was my great great Grandmother Francis Pearl Perry Attwood, who was very much the matriarch of my family in so many ways.
My mother remembered her from when she was young and told me stories about her. She told me that she remembered listening to her watch wrestling and telling one or the other to "Get that dirty curr!" She also told me with fondness about the soft molasses cookies that she always made. My mom had looked and looked for the recipe but never found anything. I asked her about it again when I was back home for Christmas two years ago. She said she'd had no luck. Being a child of the information age I went immediately to the internet and found a recipe on a recipe website that was in the submitters family for 175 years. Having never had them I had no way of knowing if it was the right recipe. But we decided to try them and see so I printed it out and we got to work. We made it on a day that my grandmother was visiting the house and my mom kept going into the other room where she was sitting to ask her questions. Eventually she came out to help us. She talked about how she remembered that my great great grandmother put boiled raisins on them ( something that my mom remembered too) and then suggested that they might be good with walnuts or pecans in them.
It was a surreal moment when we were all baking together, my mom and grandma sharing memories of these beloved and well remembered cookies, and I realized that these cookies were "Grandma's cookies" to every last one of us. VERY cool moment. They tasted them when we were done and they said they thought it was the recipe but really couldn't be completely sure. We served them at the family Christmas Eve party and my grandma's aunt Byrdie was there and after tasteing them said "These taste like my mother's cookies" It was then we were satisfied that we'd gotten it right. Although she also mentioned how horribly dry they were so maybe we didn't have them perfect.
Five generations of happy Soft Molasses Cookie eaters.
When I inherited my grandmother's cookbooks I found Soft Molasses cookie recipes on 3x5 cards all over in the cookbook and unlike the peanut brittle recipe they were all different recipes. In other cookbooks I inherited from her the soft molasses cookie recipes were marked. It was obvious that she had been searching for that recipe and perhaps trying to recreate it herself for years without definitive success.
I'm going to write the recipe we found on the internet because that is the one we made and had the approval of my great grand aunt. Anyone wanting to try the others that my grandmother found can contact me for better copies.
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Soft molasses cookies
1 cup shortening
1 cup dark brown sugar
2 cups dark molasses
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar
1 tablespoon baking soda
1 cup buttermilk
9 cups all purpose flour
Cream shortening and sugar. Add molasses slowly, stirring constantly. Mix spices with cream of tartar and add to mixture.
Mix baking soda and buttermilk. Add alternately with the flour to the sugar and spices mixture. You may not need the whole 9 cups of flour but you should end up with a fairly stiff dough. Chill dough overnight
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F
Roll dough out to at least 1/4 inch (thick the thicker the better), using as little flour as possible. Keep dough refrigerated when not rolling and cutting. Cut into cookies and brush with beaten egg. Bake for 10-12 minutes at 350 degrees. Alternately you can form the dough into golf ball size round, roll in white sugar, place on a cookie sheet and then flatten slightly.
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The trickiest thing we found was getting the right thickness. We cut them into 3 inch circles and put plump boiled raisins on the top before putting them in the oven ( because this is how my great great grandma did it). All you do to plump raisins is to put a bunch in water and simmer until they are plumped. It takes longer than you might think. I don't remember brushing them with egg either but that may be because we put the raisins on them. The recipe also said this recipe is good for making gingerbread men. Something to try next time perhaps because my son loves making men out of sugar cookies.
I'll need to make this recipe periodically throughout my sons lives so that they will have memories of these cookies that were lovingly made in abundance by their Great great great grandmother and then they too will have a connection to her. Boys connect well through their stomachs I've found.
