Joe Froggers

Our senior editor Bridget Lancaster first tasted these cookies at a bakery near her home in Marblehead, Massachusetts. Not only were they as big as her face and as flat as a pancake, they were incredibly moist, slightly salty, and tasted strongly of clove and rum. She was so taken with these old-fashioned cookies, she set out to develop her own recipe. Here’s what she discovered:

Test Kitchen Discoveries

• Dissolving salt into the rum and water gave the cookie its distinctive salty flavor.
• Many old recipes call for lard, but we found that the cookies taste better baked with butter.