Grandma Ona’s Recipes: “HOLIDAY EDITION”
–a selection of holiday recipes gleaned from the pages of Grandma Ona’s recipe notebooks (1930s-1960s) just in time for your "vintage" holiday baking--
#3: Mother Smith’s “GINGER COOKIES” plus GINGER FROSTING recipe
11/30/22 (NOTE: Uh-oh! G'ma Ona forgot to include the "main" ingredient to her mother-in-law's Ginger Cookie recipe ...based on similar recipes, I see that she left out the "FLOUR." Today I tried out this recipe with 3-c. white flour and substituted butter for lard. The listed 1/2 cup of hot water baffled me--so I only used about half of it to make the stiff dough manageable before placing it in the fridge to chill overnight. I also prepared this recipe without the aid of modern, electric gadgets, as my great-grandmother "Mother Smith" would have done~if a wooden spoon was good enough for her, it's good enough for me!)
12/1/22 (UPDATE: In future I would adjust the recipe to start with about 3 1/2 cups of flour and then add enough to roll out the dough. The cookies turned out nice but not as sweet or spicy as anticipated. And don't even ask me about my homemade piping... ) YIELD: about 3 dozen cookies, baked crisp.
12/2/22 (ANOTHER DISCOVERY: Just as most of G'ma's recipes omit things that would have been commonly known to home bakers of her day--oh, you know, things like oven temperature, cooking time, etc.--the omission of FLOUR in this recipe would likely have been intentional. There is a hint to this fact in the posted recipe for GINGER SNAPS with instructions that simply read: "flour enough to roll them.")
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