Ginger Cookies

History

This recipe for ginger cookies is printed in "What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking" (San Francisco, 1881), the cookbook of Abby Fisher. Her version is a molasses-and-ginger dough — molasses, sugar, butter, lard, flour, ginger, cinnamon, allspice, and yeast powder (a chemical leavener), rolled out, cut, and baked. The instructions in the book are hers: she notes in her preface that, "Not being able to read or write myself," the writing of the book was done at her dictation.

Abby Fisher was born in Orangeburg, South Carolina, in June 1831 to Abbie Clifton, and after emancipation settled on the West Coast, where she cooked, catered, and ran a pickle and preserves business in San Francisco; she could neither read nor write and dictated her recipes to friends. Genealogical research in San Francisco records identifies her father as James J. Andrews, an Orangeburg planter who held some seventy people in slavery, and an 1869 receipt from the Freedman's Savings and Trust in Mobile records her under her mother's name. Before 1865, censuses recorded only an enslaver's name with the age and sex of those he held, so no surviving record names Fisher herself; Karen Hess, who rediscovered her book, noted that absence of documentation. Her preface presents the book as the record of "an experience of upwards of thirty-five years — in the art of cooking", and she notes that her work had already drawn requests from patrons and from "ladies of Sacramento during the State Fair in 1879" — recognition borne out by the diploma she earned at the 1879 Sacramento State Fair and the two medals she won at the San Francisco Mechanics' Institute Fair in 1880. The 1881 book is among the earliest cookbooks by an African American author and the second known cookbook by a Black woman in the United States, after Malinda Russell's "Domestic Cook Book" (1866).

The historical record does not document a specific earlier origin for this particular recipe. It is best understood as Abby Fisher's own, set down in her name within the Southern cooking she had practiced for decades.

Ingredients

• 1 teacup molasses
• 0.5 teacup sugar
• 1 tablespoon butter
• 1 tablespoon lard
• 1 quart flour
• 2 tablespoon ginger
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon allspice
• 2 tablespoon yeast powder

Instructions

1. Cream butter and sugar together and add molasses.
2. Sift yeast powder and flour together and add to the butter, sugar and molasses mixture.
3. Add lard and spices, and work it up well.
4. Roll out on a board and cut them out.
5. Bake like you would a biscuit.