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Hotel Ginger-Snaps
One gallon molasses, two pounds brown sugar, one quart melted butter, half cup each ground cloves, mace, cinnamon and ginger, one cup soda.- Mrs. Hattie Clemmons.
This is a bakery formula, not a household one: it lists the wet ingredients and leavening for several hundred cookies and assumes the baker knows the rest. Read it as a ratio rather than a set of instructions.
- The flour is missing, and that is the pointNo flour, no eggs, no mixing method, no oven. A hotel baker would have worked flour into the spiced molasses mixture until the dough was stiff enough to roll thin — very roughly 20 to 25 pounds for this quantity. Without that judgment call the recipe cannot be followed literally.
- ScaleA gallon of molasses is 16 cups and weighs about 11 lb; with 2 lb brown sugar, 2 lb butter and the flour a working baker would add, this is 35 to 40 pounds of dough and many hundreds of thin snaps. Divide by eight or sixteen before attempting it.
- A quart of melted butterMeasured as liquid, that is 4 cups, about 2 lb.
- One cup of sodaThat is roughly a tablespoon of bicarbonate per cup of molasses, more than most modern ginger-snap recipes use. Molasses of the period was often sulphured and may have been more acidic, which would have called for more soda; with today's unsulphured molasses the same ratio is likely to give a soapy, faintly metallic edge and a very dark, spreading cookie. Cut it hard.
- SpicesHalf a cup each of cloves, mace, cinnamon and ginger is about 2 cups of spice in total — assertive but in proportion to the batch. Mace is the outer covering of the nutmeg seed; nutmeg is a reasonable stand-in at the same quantity if mace is not to hand.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cooking molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and will fight the spice. Sorghum syrup, boiled widely in Ohio when this book was compiled, behaves similarly.
- Rolling and bakingSnaps depend on being rolled thin — an eighth of an inch or less — and baked hot and briefly: 375F for 8 to 10 minutes, until the edges set and the centers still look soft. They crisp as they cool. Chilling the dough first makes it manageable.
Buckeye Cookery (1877) collected recipes from Ohio housekeepers alongside a scattering of commercial formulas, and this is plainly one of the latter — a quantity meant for a hotel or boarding-house kitchen turning out cookies by the barrel for the counter and the lunch pail. Ginger snaps were a keeping cookie: dry, hard, heavily spiced, and cheap, since molasses often carried the sweetness in place of refined sugar, though its use varied by region, class and date. The heavy hand with soda reflects the chemistry of the time, when saleratus and then bicarbonate were paired with acidic molasses to raise a dough that had no eggs and no yeast in it. Contributor attributions like Mrs. Hattie Clemmons run all through the book; whether she baked at this scale herself or copied the formula from a baker she knew, the compilers printed it as received.