Dear Mrs. Smith of Rome,

I suspect you are long dead and will not receive this letter, but last weekend I found my grandmother’s book of dessert recipes. I was hoping to find some notes about the summer pudding she used to make with blueberries and bread, but there were none. Faced with a nearly empty ice box and a need to produce a comestible contribution for our monthly book club tonight, I leafed through the handwritten or typewritten or clipped-and-glued pages of sweets. Your “Dropped Molasses Cookies” were faintly dubious in title, but I had nearly all the  ingredients in the pantry.

I did not have “cold lard or drippings,” but your recommendation of them has caused me to reconsider the flavors cookies may have had in the past. As far as I am able to recollect without searching the family genealogies, my relations last resided in Rome, NY in the era of my great-grandparents. It had never occurred to me that their experience of a molasses cookie might have included “drippings.” Anyway, I am a vegetarian, so I hope butter was an acceptable substitute.

I also wasn’t sure what sort of molasses you had in mind. Would the default molasses have been blackstrap or sweetened seventy years ago (or more)? At any rate, I only had blackstrap and there wasn’t a full cup left in the bottle, so I topped it off with some Lyle’s Golden Syrup. I’m not sure if this would have been familiar to you or not, but my half-English grandmother certainly knew about it, so I felt I was still proceeding in the right spirit.

At this point I made perhaps my most controversial innovation. I didn’t have any ground cloves; in fact, I remember trying to buy them recently and their being either unavailable or absurdly expensive. So I used garam masala instead. I believe you won’t have heard of garam masala, as I don’t think Indian cookery had yet attained much popularity in the Northeast United States when you were living there. It is a blend of various peppers and spices, including cloves, and upon sniffing the bottle I was able to imagine it lending a piquant note to the cookies. In it went, although I didn’t dare add quite so much as the half teaspoon you had stipulated for the cloves.

I appreciated your instruction about the more-or-less 3 1/4 cups of flour. “Use your judgement” is positively Zimmermannesque. I think this time I may have judged on the side of a little too much flour, but I will remember this and make adjustments at next baking.

You left me entirely in the dark as to the optimal temperature and time for baking, my good woman. So I have guessed at 375 degrees and eleven minutes. I hope the cookies will come out well. I have licked the spatula and the batter certainly holds promise.

Yours sincerely,

Mary Theresa Soper’s great-granddaughter Sarah

Update: The cookies were pretty good! They’d be even better with chunks of crystallized ginger. I think molasses was probably sweetened back in the day, because these were not very sweet — I actually rolled the second batch in brown sugar before dropping them onto the cookie sheet. And ten minutes is enough baking time.