When I wrote about the MacPhersons in Colorado, Granny MacPherson always had ginger cookies in her apron pocket to give her grandchildren—normally one to each child, unless it was the first time on the ranch, then the child got TWO.
I didn’t think too much about giving them cookies, after all, I made cookies all the time when my children were growing up—chocolate chip ones. But when I got ready to post the recipe Granny used, I discovered something. Using Google Books Advanced Search, I looked for a recipe that Granny might have used to make those ginger cookies. I found recipes for gingerbread, hard gingerbread, and ginger-nuts. But I struggled to find a recipe for Ginger Cookies. At last, I found one in a cook book titled Ladies Indispensable Assistant from 1853. Here is the recipe I found:
Ginger Cookies
Take one tea-cup of sugar, one of molasses, one egg, one spoonful of saleratus, one of ginger and one of vinegar: and mix them with seven tea-cups of flour.
That’s all the recipe—no oven temperature, no instructions for rolling out, no cooking time. I guess the lady of the house learned those things by trial and error.
Being a writer, I decided I needed to come up with some background of how Granny got this cook book. Here it is: Granny’s son-in-law, James Worbly, was a publisher in St. Louis, Missouri. He edited and printed Worbly’s Family Monthly Magazine (if you want to see copies of this magazine, you can find it at http://worblysmagazine.com/magazines/
Anyway, James received copies of different books, like the one listed above, to include in his magazine—it was kind of like a Reader’s Digest of the mid-19th Century. When a part of the clan passed through Missouri as they moved from Pennsylvania to Kansas in 1954, James’ wife Anice got an opportunity to visit with her family. As a far-well gift, Anice gave the cook book (which her husband had already used for his magazine) to her mother. Every time Granny made ginger cookies, she thought of her daughter.
