Ginger Snaps
2 cupfuls molasses 1 cupful brown sugar 1 cupful Crisco 2 teaspoonfuls baking soda 2 teaspoonfuls powdered ginger 1 teaspoonful powdered mace 1 teaspoonful salt 2 tablespoonfuls boiling water Flour Cream Crisco and sugar together, add molasses, spices, salt, soda mixed with boiling water and sufficient flour to make stiff paste. Roll out thin, cut with small cutter, lay on Criscoed tins and bake in hot oven from five to seven minutes.
Sufficient for one hundred snaps.
A straightforward rolled molasses cookie, but the flour is left entirely to the cook's judgment and the dough is far easier to handle cold than warm.
- The unmeasured flour"Sufficient flour to make stiff paste" works out to roughly 6 to 7 cups for this quantity of liquid, added gradually until the dough no longer sticks to the bowl. Stop as soon as it holds together; excess flour is what turns snaps into bricks rather than crisp wafers.
- Chill before rollingThe dough is slack and greasy at room temperature. An hour in the refrigerator, worked in two or three batches, is the difference between rolling it thin and fighting it.
- "Hot oven"The book gives no temperatures; "hot" in period usage is somewhere around 400 to 425F. At five to seven minutes the snaps go from set to scorched quickly, so watch the first tray and use it to calibrate the rest.
- Roll genuinely thinAn eighth of an inch or less. These are meant to snap, and thickness is the single variable that decides whether they come out crisp or chewy.
- CriscoThe book was written to promote it, hence the branding throughout. Any modern all-vegetable shortening behaves the same; butter gives more flavour but spreads more and browns faster.
- MolassesUse unsulphured dark molasses rather than blackstrap, which is bitter and heavier than a recipe of this date is likely to have intended. Two cupfuls is a great deal of sweetening in its own right.
- Soda and boiling waterDissolving the soda in boiling water disperses it evenly through a stiff, sticky dough and starts it reacting with the molasses immediately. Mix it in last and get the dough into the oven without a long wait.
- MaceThe dried outer covering (aril) of the nutmeg seed, lighter and more delicate than nutmeg itself. Ground nutmeg will substitute, using slightly less.
- YieldOne hundred snaps implies the "small cutter" the recipe calls for, though it does not say what size. The batch is large; the dough keeps several days refrigerated and the baked snaps keep for weeks in a tin.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre of early twentieth-century cookbook published by a manufacturer to teach cooks how to use a new product; here that product is Crisco, the hydrogenated vegetable shortening introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911, which is why it appears in nearly every recipe and even as a verb ("Criscoed tins"). Ginger snaps themselves are much older, descended from the hard spiced molasses biscuits of British and northern European baking. The molasses is doing several jobs at once: sweetener, moistener, and the acid that the baking soda reacts with, a pairing generally traced to the saleratus baking of the mid-1800s.