Sweet as Molasses

Grandma June was the one who told me about the Great Molasses Flood of 1919.

“There was a huge tank of molasses that sat outside,” she began, scooping molasses out of a jar with a measuring spoon. “Well, the tank was shoddily made, and the temperature that day climbed and climbed and climbed. And what happens to my cookies when they get hot in the oven?”

“They spread!” I cried.

She beamed at me and nodded. “That’s right! You combine weak construction with expanding molasses, and you get…” She flipped the spoon over and slammed it against the rim of her mixing bowl. “Boom! Over two million gallons of molasses unleashed onto the streets of Boston. A thirty-five mile per hour wave - way faster than what I’ve got here.”

I giggled as she reached for a rubber scraper and dislodged the rest of the molasses from her measuring spoon. “The cleanup took months. And who knows if they even got it all? They say that on a hot day in Boston, you can still smell the sweetness from those molasses.” She caught my eye and winked.

“Have you been there?”

“Nah - but if you have one of these, you’ll never need to go.”

When I tried those cookies, still warm from the oven and releasing a perfume of cinnamon and ginger, I closed my eyes. I could practically see a gigantic, cola-brown tsunami swelling in front of me, cresting and crashing and sweeping me away like a wave pool at a sticky-sweet water park.

“Grandma,” I gasped, “these cookies are…are…life-changing.”

It wasn’t until years later that I learned that twenty-one people died in the Great Molasses Flood, and over a hundred and fifty people were injured - not quite the Willy Wonka-esque river of molasses that I had pictured. Still, it wasn’t enough to overwrite that moment in Grandma June’s kitchen, with her butter-yellow mixing bowl gleaming in the sunlight, the most intoxicating spices mingling in the air, and Grandma June’s laughter echoing from every corner.

It was a taste I could never recreate for myself. Not the exact taste of her cookies - I knew that I would never be able to make them like she did. I was chasing my own kind of molasses cookies. I was chasing the instance when I tasted a new recipe for the first time and blew myself away, my senses so overwhelmed by flavor and aroma that my brain would have no choice but to take a snapshot of the moment that I could return to year after year, tucked away with the rest of my most treasured memories.

That’s the moment I’d know that I had arrived. That’s the moment I’d know that I had finally created something life-changing and become a baker like Grandma June.

By gum and by golly, did I chase that moment.

I started by recreating her molasses cookies. I tried adding honey. I tried adding maple syrup. I tried substituting almond flour. I tried different spices and played with their ratios. I bought a mortar and pestle and ground my own ginger, cinnamon, and cloves.

“They don’t taste right,” I’d moan, sharing batch after batch with Grandma June.

“I think these taste phenomenal,” she’d say, three cookies in one hand and a mug of black coffee in the other. “Please, come and share your delicious failures with me any time.”

Of course, I tried branching out and baking other things. I froze slices of butter and smashed them into flour to make pie crust. I piped macarons over and over and over until they developed frilly feet and a smooth shell in the oven. I whipped pudding into butter to make American and German buttercreams, and whipped butter into egg foam to make Swiss and Italian buttercreams.

But no matter how tender my pie crusts were, how chewy my macarons were, or how light and silky my buttercreams were, I kept going back to molasses cookies. There was something about them that was so rich and malty, so complex and comforting. They were the perfect cookie, the shape and flavor of happiness, and I wouldn’t rest - couldn’t rest - until I unlocked them for myself.

But the rise of my baking overlapped with the decline of Grandma June’s. 

The first time I noticed it, I had stopped by her house to share my latest attempts. Everything looked like it should - Grandma June at the kitchen table, drinking coffee out of her flamingo pink mug and reading a romance novel with a damsel in distress on the cover. I sank into a chair, and right as I began bellyaching about my baking, I saw it: her left hand, holding the coffee mug, shook slightly.

I blinked, not entirely sure of what I saw, and immediately convinced myself that it was nothing. Muscle spasms didn’t mean certain doom.

But then I saw it again.

“Has your hand been shaking?” I asked.

“Oh, you know. Sometimes it twitches.”

“Is it new?”

Grandma June shrugged. “Well, maybe. Not too sure when it started.”

“And you haven’t seen a doctor about it?”

“If I went to a doctor every time my bones creaked, I’d never leave the hospital!” 

She started to laugh, but stopped when she saw my face. “Dearie, don’t worry.” She reached over and patted my hand. “I feel fine.”

But she wasn’t fine, and I could see it getting worse every time I visited. Grandma June began resting her right hand on top of her left to hide the tremors, but it couldn’t disguise the truth. Her arms and hands - the ones I remembered kneading bread, rolling out sugar cookies, beating egg whites with a whisk - were growing weaker. Her pots and pans, her stand mixer and baking trays, were now too heavy for her to lift.

It was the walk that finally broke me. I popped in for a chat and she offered me a coffee. The moment she got up from the kitchen table, I regretted accepting it. She gingerly hoisted herself up from the table, the simple act of rising to her feet taking several seconds. Once she was standing, she teetered ever so slightly, like a Jenga tower with one too many blocks missing, and my heart jumped into my throat. My muscles were tense and my stomach was in knots as she shuffled toward the coffee maker, limbs rigid and wooden, and poured me a cup of coffee with trembling hands.

“By gum and by golly,” she said with a chuckle, “you always come by right after I make a fresh pot.”

I looked at her and couldn’t stop the tears from flowing.

It took some convincing, but Grandma June finally went to the doctor. Once the fear of her falling over was too great, she agreed to move into assisted living. Even though I inherited her yellow mixing bowl and all of her cookbooks, I couldn’t muster the energy to bake. All my motivation to chase the perfect bite, something I had been working towards for years, had evaporated. There were way more pressing matters now than a show stopping cookie.

I’d still bring a sweet treat when I visited Grandma June, but they weren’t from my own kitchen.

“You stopped baking,” she said one day, plucking a lilac cupcake out of a pastry box.

I sighed. “It’s been hard to find the time.”

“That didn’t stop you before.” She raised her eyebrows and stuck out her tongue, and I couldn't help but giggle. “Well, I don’t mind if you bring me something store-bought, as long as you keep bringing me anything at all. You’re making me quite popular with the nurses and the fellas.”

“Not the ladies?”

“Nah. They’re still sore that I beat them in poker.” She licked the frosting off of her fingers. “I don’t think they’d eat anything I offered them, anyway.”

“And why is that?”

“Oh, I told them that you could get away with cyanide poisoning if you mixed it in some almond cookies. Cyanide smells like almonds to some people, you know, so it’s a great way to mask the poison if you wanted to off someone who could sense it.”

“Gee,” I said flatly, “I wonder why they wouldn’t take a crumb from you. Remind me again, how did Grandpa die?”

The seasons changed, and while I kept visiting Grandma June as often as I could, I never so much as turned my oven on. It felt so odd to have been so obsessed with something that, in retrospect, felt so trivial. Just like coming across a One Direction T-shirt or a copy of Twilight in the thrift store, it was slightly embarrassing to behold what once took up so much of my focus and energy, but now didn’t have a place in my life.

That all changed one day. I was taking a shortcut from visiting Grandma June when I passed the entrance to the cemetery, and a particular headstone caught my eye.

It was a typical rectangular gravestone, but the very top was shaped like an open book, and it looked like there was writing on the pages. I backtracked and went up to it, and saw that a recipe was etched into the stone pages:

MUSTARD MOLASSES COOKIES

Cream: 1 cup butter, 1 cup sugar

Add: 1 egg

Add: 2 Tbsp molasses, 1 Tbsp whole-grain mustard, 1 Tbsp cream

Add: 2-½ cups flour, 2 tsp ginger, 1 tsp cinnamon, 1 tsp baking soda, 1 tsp salt

Rest: 1 hour

Bake: 350 F, 10-12 minutes

I stared at the gravestone, mouth slightly agape.

“Whole grain mustard?” I gasped. “That sounds insane...uh, no offense…” - I checked the name on the stone - “...Felicity Senf. No way, nuh-uh. That’s bonkers.”

I had tried so many sweet additions into my molasses cookies that mustard sounded utterly ridiculous…and yet. 

And yet Felicity Senf, at the age of 88, had chosen that recipe to be on her headstone for the rest of eternity. Out of everything she baked in her nearly nine decades on this planet, that was the one she decided to immortalize.

If that’s not an endorsement, then what is?

I snapped a photo of the recipe and all but ran to the closest grocery store. Back at my apartment, I felt a little like Doctor Frankenstein as I mixed up the dough and scooped out the cookies, but the mad flicker of possibility was too tantalizing to ignore.

As they baked, my kitchen filled with the familiar aroma of caramelized sugar and cinnamon - but there was something else now. Something spicier than ginger and almost earthy was cutting through the syrupy treacle of the molasses. I closed my eyes and took a breath, drinking in the savory-sweet combination.

I couldn’t wait until they cooled and singed my finger trying to grab a cookie. I tried again with a fork, blew on it frantically to cool it down, and took a bite.

Boom. It felt like fireworks exploding in my mouth. I could taste the familiar sweetness of the molasses mixed in with the warmth of the spices, but there was a zippiness from the mustard that almost knocked me off my feet.

I could taste the individual components in their purest forms - the ginger that came from a root, the cinnamon that came from tree bark, the mustard that came from seeds - but I could also taste how they came together and lit a flame in my chest. I felt toasty and cozy in a way that I hadn't in years. I felt safe in a way that I hadn't since Grandma June got sick.

The strength gave out in my knees and I sank to the floor, tears falling down my face.

The next time I visited Grandma June, I brought a bouquet of flowers for Felicity Senf. "Thank you," I whispered, laying them down at Felicity's grave. "I'm sure you heard this a lot, but you were right."

I walked a few rows over to see Grandma June and sighed. "You'll never believe it, but I found it - I found my show stopping recipe. And you'll never guess where." I pointed over to Felicity Senf. "It was a few feet from you this whole time. If you ever see Felicity, give her my thanks. She’s got some wild ideas, but she knows what she’s doing."

I reached out and touched the gravestone, tracing the etching: June Alice Bryant. Loving mother and grandmother. "I wish you could have tried them, Grandma. By gum and by golly, they were life-changing.”