Home › Small Cakes › Ginger Snaps
Ginger Snaps
1/2 cupful lard, 1/2 cupful butter, 1 large cupful brown sugar, 1 cupful water, 1 tablespoonful extract ginger, 1 teaspoonful each extract cinnamon and cloves, 1 quart flour, 1-1/2 teaspoonfuls baking-powder. Rub to a smooth paste the lard, butter, and sugar; then rub it into the flour and powder sifted together. Mix into a firm dough with the water and extracts. Roll out the dough thin on a floured board, cut out with a round biscuit-cutter, and bake on greased pan, in a hot, steady oven, eight minutes.
A plain rolled ginger snap built on extracts rather than molasses, which makes it paler and crisper than the modern version. The dough is stiff and unfussy; the whole result depends on rolling it genuinely thin and watching the short bake.
- Roll it thinThese snap because they are thin, not because of any leavening trick. Aim for about 1/8 inch or less; at 1/4 inch you get a soft spice cookie instead.
- A hot, steady ovenThe book gives no temperature; in a modern oven something in the region of 400-425F, fully preheated, is the usual reading of 'hot'. Eight minutes is plausible at that heat for thin rounds, and they can go from set to scorched very quickly at the end.
- A quart of flourRoughly 4 cups, about 1 lb or 500 g. Older flours absorbed differently, so hold back the last half cup and add it only if the dough will not come together as a firm, rollable mass.
- Extract of ginger and spiceThese were alcohol or oil-based flavouring essences sold by the druggist. Ground spices are the practical substitute: about 1 tablespoon ground ginger and 1 teaspoon each ground cinnamon and cloves, added to the dry ingredients rather than the water. If you use modern spice oils, they are far stronger and want drops, not spoonfuls.
- Lard and butterPeriod recipes often split the fats this way: lard was credited with shortness, butter with flavour. All butter should work too, though it may give a slightly softer cookie.
- Rubbing inCreaming the fats and sugar first, then rubbing that paste through the flour, gives a short pastry-like crumb. Do it with fingertips or a pastry blender and stop when it looks like coarse meal.
- The waterAdd it gradually rather than all at once; a wet dough will not roll thin cleanly.
- Yield and keepingA quart of flour makes a very large batch of 2-inch rounds; the exact count depends on thickness and cutter. Cool them completely on a rack before storing, and keep them in a tin; they crisp further as they sit and go soft in a humid room.
Ginger snaps in nineteenth-century American cookbooks come in two broad families: the dark molasses kind, descended from British gingerbread, and paler sugar-and-extract versions like this one. Bottled flavouring extracts were widely sold by this period, and a housekeeper could buy essence of ginger, cinnamon and cloves alongside vanilla and lemon. Using extracts instead of ground spice would have given a dough without dark specks. The combination of lard and butter was common in the period, lard being the cheaper fat.