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Ginger Snaps
One cupful of brown sugar, one cupful of molasses, one cupful of lard, two eggs, a small teacup half full of boiling water, two teaspoonfuls of ginger, two of cinnamon, a teaspoonful of saleratus. Roll thin, cut out, and bake in a quick oven.
A workable snap dough, but the original omits the flour entirely — the single most important thing to sort out before you start.
- The missing flourNo quantity is given, and there is no way to reconstruct it exactly. With this much liquid (a cup of molasses, a cup of fat, two eggs, and hot water) expect somewhere around 6 to 7 cups of all-purpose flour to reach a dough stiff enough to roll thin. Add it gradually and stop when the dough stops sticking to the board.
- SaleratusAn old name for the leavening alkali sold to nineteenth-century households, effectively baking soda. Use one teaspoon of baking soda, and dissolve it in the boiling water before it goes into the dough.
- Why the boiling waterIt dissolves the soda and starts the acid-alkali reaction with the molasses, which supplies the lift and deepens the colour (though most of the brown is the molasses itself). "A small teacup half full" is roughly 2 to 3 fl oz.
- LardOne cup, about 200 g. Lard gives the short, crisp bite these are meant to have. Solid vegetable shortening substitutes cleanly; butter will spread more and yield a softer, chewier cookie.
- A quick ovenRoughly 400 to 425F. At that heat, thin rounds need only 6 to 8 minutes — watch them, since molasses doughs go from set to burnt very fast.
- Roll thinAn eighth of an inch or less. Thickness is what decides snap versus chew here; anything approaching a quarter inch will bake soft in the centre.
- Chill firstThe dough is slack when freshly mixed. An hour in the refrigerator makes it far easier to roll thin and cut cleanly.
- YieldA very large batch; the exact count depends entirely on how thin you roll and the size of the cutter. They keep several weeks in a tin and harden as they sit, which is the intent.
Ginger snaps belong to a long line of hard, spiced, molasses-sweetened keeping cookies with roots in English and Dutch baking, and they became a fixture of the American household tin. Molasses was the cheap sweetener of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a byproduct of the sugar trade, and it paired readily with ginger and cinnamon. That this recipe names saleratus rather than baking soda dates it: the term was standard through the mid-1800s and lingered in cookbooks well past the point when the product on the grocer's shelf had been renamed. Why the flour is missing is unclear; the recipe simply does not state a quantity.