So, my grandmother, my mom’s mom, is of the main reasons I make all these cookies at holiday time, and send out goodie boxes to the family. She always did, and opening the box and finding out what was inside, what new recipes she’d tried this year, was always great fun – especially when my brother and I were high school age potheads. But even at that point in my life, I appreciated my grandmother’s scientific approach to recipes, trying this and that from various cookbooks, to see how well different methods and combinations of ingredients worked – and, as Julia says “critically tasting” the results.
One of our favorite cookies that showed up in those long-ago goodie boxes was a ginger creams – a kind of chewy ginger cookie, with white frosting on top. We looked for the recipe, and in the late 1980s when I was a sorority house cook, I found a recipe in one of the sorority house cookbooks, for ginger bears – a ginger cookie that said it had the thin crust and chewy center that we remembered, and I hand copied that recipe and have been using it ever since. A few years after that long quest, once the hand-copied recipe was firmly in my cookie pantheon, I discovered what was probably the original, ginger creams, what my gramma called them, in the the 1963 Betty Crocker Cooky Book that she gave me for Christmas in 1964 (according to her inscription on the inside of the front cover). That recipe has shortening; the ginger bears have butter, so I stuck with the ginger bears.
In 2007, I entered the recipe in a Waitrose food essay contest – they were looking for the next Elizabeth David – a vicar’s wife in the UK won – but the magazine went out of business shortly after. Anyhow, I don’t think I ever made the cookies from this transcribed version – I always went back to my hand written copy. This year, I used a print out from my old blogspot blog, doubled – so 8 cups of flour – and only 2 sticks of butter. When I got to mixing the dough, I thought it looked awfully dry – I remembered other years literally pouring this dough into a bowl to chill after mixing. I checked the recipe and thought I had doubled everything except the molasses – so I added more molasses, and the quickly realized that what I now had was 4X the molasses, and 2X everything else. Forgetting the cardinal rule that adding stuff almost never solves a kitchen disaster – you just end up with more fucked up food, instead of a solution – I added enough of everything else – butter, brown sugar, spices, egg, flour – to get everything to 4X – and ended up with a giant bowl, a 16-cup of flour batch of the dough, that was still way too dry. Which got me thinking – 1 stick of butter to 4 cups of flour is really low on the butter. Could I have transcribed the recipe wrong? Should it be 1 cup, 8 ounces, instead of 1 stick, 8 tablespoons of butter? I couldn’t find that original hand copied sheet – I think I remember chucking it last year, thinking “well, I’ve transcribed it to the web now, don’t need this” – but I checked the Betty Crocker Cooky Book ginger creams, and that has 1/3 cup shortening to 2 cups of flour. Ah Ha.
So I dumped the whole mess and started over again with 1 cup butter for every four cups of flour – and the resulting cookies look a little flat, but I think they’re going to be right – taste like our memories. Whew.
