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This recipe for “Ginger Nuts” was taken from the 1883 cookbook, Ice-cream and cakes. A new collection of standard fresh and original receipts for household and commercial use, by An American (NY, Charles Scribner’s Sons). For this course, I wrote an essay that began with this recipe, looking at it as a work of literature and as a historical marker. As literature, I just mean to say that there is a lot of pleasure that can be had in reading recipes (this recipe in particular is one of my favorites) regardless of both any intention to cook the recipe and of the quality of the recipe itself. “Ginger Nuts,” in all of my efforts in the kitchen have turned out awfully. However, as words, they are everything I have ever wanted in a cookie.To actually bake them and pull the recipe from its idyllic past (manifest in the yellowed, stiff pages) is an activity completely separate from reading. To leave the pleasure of the page and begin the pursuit of perfection in baking is another topic altogether. I’ll leave you here, but rest easy, you don’t have to bake “Ginger Nuts”, they are perfect the way you see them.