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Lemon Snaps
A large cup sugar, two-thirds cup butter, half tea-spoon soda dissolved in two tea-spoons hot water, flour enough to roll thin; flavor with lemon. - Mrs. E. L. C., Springfield.
A typical Buckeye Cookery shorthand recipe: it names the ingredients, assumes the cook knows the rest, and gives neither an oven temperature nor a baking time. The essentials are recoverable, but a few gaps need filling before you start.
- The missing methodNothing here tells you what to do with the dough beyond rolling it thin. Work it as snaps of this sort were generally worked: cream the butter and sugar, beat in the dissolved soda, work in flour to a stiff paste, roll out very thin, cut, and bake.
- OvenAssume a moderate oven, about 350F, and 6 to 9 minutes. Thin sugar-and-butter dough colours fast at the edges; pull the sheet when the rims are brown and the centres still look pale, as they crisp on cooling.
- "A large cup"A period cup is a half-pint, 8 fl oz, so read this as a generous cup of sugar (roughly 7-8 oz) and two-thirds cup butter (about 5 oz). "Large" is the cook's thumb on the scale rather than a defined measure.
- Flour enough to roll thinExpect somewhere around 2 to 2 1/2 cups, but add it in stages. The dough should be stiff enough to roll without sticking and no stiffer; too much flour and the snaps bake dry rather than crisp.
- The sodaHalf a teaspoon of soda with no sour milk, molasses or cream of tartar has no acid to work against; heat alone breaks down some of it, which gives a little spread and browning rather than much lift -- which is what you want in a snap. Dissolving it in hot water helps distribute it evenly through a very stiff dough and avoids specks in the finished cookie.
- No egg, no liquidTwo teaspoons of water is the only liquid. The dough will feel short and crumbly and wants firm handling; chilling it briefly makes it far easier to roll thin. Working between two sheets of parchment saves a great deal of patching.
- Flavour with lemonMost likely lemon extract, a few drops to half a teaspoon, though zest or oil of lemon would also answer. Grated zest from one lemon gives a better flavour, though it speckles the surface; use juice sparingly if at all, as extra liquid softens the snap.
- YieldRolled properly thin and cut at about two inches, this makes three to four dozen. Store them airtight or they go soft within a day.
Snaps are often said to take their name from the sound and the snap of the break: a thin, hard, brittle cookie made without egg, which keeps for weeks in a tin and travels well. Ginger snaps are the famous survivor, but nineteenth-century American cookbooks list caraway, cinnamon, cocoanut and lemon versions alongside them, all built on the same short, stiff, rolled paste. Lemon flavouring could come from a bottled extract by the 1870s, when Buckeye Cookery was compiled in Ohio; commercial extracts were cheap, shelf-stable and did not require a fresh lemon shipped inland. Contributions came in from across Ohio and the Midwest, identified by initials, Mrs. E. L. C. of Springfield among them.