Mrs. A. B. Larcom's Recipe for Molasses Drop Cookies

I was having fun this morning looking through recipes my great-grandmother, Grace Stormann Sargent, saved. I was able to take photos of  her hand-written recipes a few years back. Here's my great-grandmother and her husband, James Butman Sargent.  

She had saved a newspaper clipping recipe for Molasses Drop Cookies  by Mrs. A. B. Larcom of Farmington, Maine.  In the cookie recipe there are "two cups of oatmeal flour". 

I was curious as to who Mrs. Larcom was, so I fired up The Google Machine.  An A. B. Larcom had listed his 275 acre Farmington dairy farm for sale in 1917. It sounds pretty inviting - "steam heat"! 

My sleuthing doesn't tell me when the recipe clipping was from that my great-grandmother had saved. There were many hand-written recipes, and no dates except that tucked in were recipes from 1940's during war rationing times.

So what do we know about Mrs. A. B. Larcom?  After writing this blog post I went to a genealogy site and found quite a bit of information by first searching for her husband.   Her name was Selma Olivia Johannson. 

Selma Olivia Johansson Larcom

Selma was born in Sweden, and came to America when she was 20 years old, around 1900. She married Albion B. Larcom at 24 in Hingham, Massachusetts. When she and her husband Albion married, he was a chauffeur, and she was a cook. They moved to Maine before 1910. He was trying to sell the dairy farm in 1917. He passed away in 1919 of complications from appendicitis. She was 39. She outlived her husband by more than 50 years, She died in Longwood, Florida at the age of 91. 

Now I really want to make her cookies! Her cookies were found worthy of printing in the newspaper back in the day. So I'm putting this out there to say, "Mrs. A. B. Larcom of Farmington, Maine - AKA Selma - you are remembered! I will make your cookies."  But the question is should I use 1 or 2 cups of shortening? 1 or 2 cups of water? Hmmmmm. 

It's my hope that in a box somewhere another person will find a document that remembers someone I would like to know about from my family, or an artist that we know little about. Pssssst!  Izannah Walker descendants!  I KNOW you are out there and you have some images of Izannah Walker.  Please share.