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Ginger Snaps
Mix half a pound of flour with two table-spoonfuls of moist sugar. Add a pinch of salt, a dessert-spoonful of ground ginger, and a pinch of cayenne. Make into a paste with four ounces of treacle and a table-spoonful of milk. Bake in a moderate oven, on a buttered tin, in small round cakes, till crisp, which will take from fifteen to twenty minutes. Probable cost, 4d.
A very plain snap: flour, sugar, treacle, spice, no butter and no raising agent. The whole character of the biscuit depends on rolling it thin and letting it cool hard.
- Moist sugarVictorian "moist sugar" is unrefined soft sugar; light or dark brown sugar is the direct equivalent. Two tablespoons is roughly 1 oz, so this is a barely sweet dough that leans on the treacle.
- TreacleBritish black treacle, or molasses in the United States. Golden syrup will work but gives a paler, milder snap with less of the slightly bitter edge the recipe expects. Four ounces is about 1/3 cup by volume.
- Spoon measuresA dessert-spoonful of ground ginger is about 2 teaspoons, which for 8 oz of flour is assertive but in keeping with a snap. Victorian spoon measures were not standardised and may run a little larger than modern ones; treat it as a generous tablespoon.
- The cayenneNot a misprint. A pinch of cayenne behind the ginger turns up in a number of nineteenth-century ginger biscuit and gingerbread recipes, adding warmth rather than heat. Keep it to a scant 1/8 teaspoon.
- OvenA moderate oven is usually read as somewhere around 325-350F (165-180C). Watch the last five minutes: treacle darkens fast and a snap goes from deep brown to burnt without much warning.
- No leavening, so roll thinNo leavening, so keep them thin -- There is no butter and no soda here, so the dough will be stiff and slightly crumbly. Knead it briefly until it coheres. The recipe says only "small round cakes" and gives no thickness; rolling thin and cutting rounds with a small cutter is one way to get there, and anything thick will bake hard rather than crisp.
- Crispness comes on coolingThey will still yield a little when they come out of the oven. Lift them to a rack and let them cool completely before judging; if they are chewy the next day, the dough was too thick or the bake too short.
- YieldYield depends on thickness and cutter size; this quantity of dough will make several dozen small rounds. Store airtight, as they pull damp from the air quickly.
Ginger biscuits of this kind were among the cheapest sweet things a Victorian household could turn out, and the printed fourpence for the whole batch -- Cassell's gives a probable cost for every recipe -- shows how little was at stake, when butter alone ran to something like a shilling or more a pound. The absence of any fat in the dough is the tell: treacle and milk alone bind the flour, so nothing expensive is committed to the pan. Ginger itself had been a fixture of British baking since the medieval spice trade and was by the nineteenth century thoroughly domesticated and widely sold ground. The cayenne is the older habit showing through: spiced sweet baking in Britain often treated pepper and ginger as companions rather than opposites, and gingerbread recipes carrying a trace of pepper are found well into the 1800s. "Snap" is generally traced to the sound and the break of a properly thin, dry biscuit rather than to any particular place or maker.