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Ginger-Snaps (Two cups molasses one of lard)
Two cups molasses, one of lard, one table-spoon soda, one of ginger, flour to roll stiff. - Miss Mary Gallagher.
A characteristically terse Buckeye Cookery formula: proportions only, with the flour, oven and timing left to the cook's judgment. Everything you need to fill in is below.
- The hinge: how stiff is "stiff to roll"The hinge: how stiff is "flour to roll stiff" -- The dough should be firm enough to roll to about 1/8 inch without sticking or tearing, roughly the feel of a firm pie dough. Expect somewhere in the region of 6 to 7 cups of flour for this quantity, added a cup at a time; too much and the snaps turn dry and pale rather than crisp.
- Cups in this bookA cup in an 1870s Ohio kitchen is close enough to the modern 8 fl oz measure for baking of this sort. Spoon measures were not standardised, so a scant tablespoon of soda is the safer reading, since excess soda leaves a soapy, metallic taste.
- MolassesUse unsulphured dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and will overwhelm the ginger. Light or "mild" molasses gives a paler, sweeter snap.
- LardLeaf lard or rendered pork fat is what was meant, and it gives the short, snapping texture the name promises. Modern shortening substitutes cup for cup; butter works but spreads more and browns faster, so watch the first tray.
- No sugar, and that is deliberateThe molasses is the only sweetener. The dough will taste sharply of ginger and treacle raw, and mellows considerably in the oven.
- OvenThe recipe names none. Bake at 350F for 8 to 10 minutes, until the edges are set and the centers just lose their gloss. They firm and crisp as they cool, so pulling them while they still look slightly soft is correct.
- Mixing orderBeat the soda into the molasses first, off heat; it will foam. Work in the lard, then the ginger, then the flour. Chilling the dough an hour makes it far easier to roll thin.
- YieldA very large batch, several dozen two-inch snaps and likely more. The dough keeps well wrapped and chilled for several days.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877) came out of Marysville, Ohio, and was compiled from contributions by named local women, which is why this one carries Miss Mary Gallagher's name at the end. The style of the entry is typical of the book and of the community cookbook genre generally: a list of proportions for a cook who already knows what a rolled cookie dough should feel like and how her own stove behaves. Ginger snaps of this kind, sweetened entirely with molasses and shortened with lard, were an American household staple through the nineteenth century, when molasses was far cheaper than refined sugar and many kitchens are said to have rendered their own pork fat. The snap comes from rolling the dough thin and baking it dry rather than from any leavening trick; the soda is there mainly to cut the acidity of the molasses and give a little lift and a browner crumb.