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Ginger Snaps Without Eggs (Without Eggs)
"Like We Buy" 1 cup molasses 1 cup sugar 1 cup shortening (lard or butter) 1 teaspoon (heaping) soda 1 teaspoon (level) ginger 1 teaspoon salt ½ cup boiling water Five Roses flour to stiffen.
Do not roll out. Pinch off pieces size of marbles and roll with hands. Place about 1 inch apart in pans and bake in moderate oven until right shade is obtained.
Note on Ginger Snaps-If gingersnap dough be mixed at night and left standing in a cool place till morning, it can be handled far more easily and with less flour (especially when Five Roses is used) than in the usual way. Moreover, it utilizes the first oven heat. Ground ginger may be omitted, and finely chopped preserved ginger used instead.
A molasses drop-and-roll snap from a book written to sell Canadian hard-wheat flour, which is why the flour is given as "to stiffen" rather than as a measurement. The dough is soft when mixed and firms up considerably as it cools.
- Flour quantity"To stiffen" is genuinely open-ended; with this much liquid and fat expect to need a great deal of flour — likely four cups or more of all-purpose — added gradually until the dough can be pinched and rolled between the palms. Stop when it stops sticking to your hands; extra flour past that point makes the snaps hard rather than crisp.
- Take the overnight rest seriouslyThe note at the end is the most useful line in the recipe. Chilling the dough overnight lets the flour hydrate and the fat set, so it rolls into balls with much less added flour and bakes to a better texture.
- Moderate ovenConventionally taken as about 350F, though the book gives no temperature. Watch the colour rather than the clock — roughly 8 to 12 minutes depending on ball size.
- Soda and boiling waterThe recipe does not say so, but the usual handling is to stir the heaping teaspoon of soda into the ½ cup boiling water and add it to the molasses mixture. The soda leavens and neutralises some of the molasses acidity, which contributes to the dark colour.
- ShorteningOne cup of lard gives the crumbly, short texture the recipe is after; butter gives more flavour and a little more spread. Modern vegetable shortening also works. Cream it with the sugar before adding the molasses.
- SpacingOne inch is close; a dough this soft will spread, so you may want to allow more room between the balls on a parchment-lined sheet.
- "Until right shade is obtained"The cue is a deep, even brown with the tops cracked and set at the edges but still slightly soft in the middle. They crisp as they cool; a snap that is hard coming out of the oven will be brittle by morning.
- Preserved gingerIf you swap the ground ginger for preserved (stem) ginger in syrup, use about ¼ cup finely chopped and blot the syrup off, or the dough will need still more flour.
- YieldMarble-sized pieces from this quantity of dough should give several dozen small snaps, depending on how much flour the dough took.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company as advertising for its Five Roses brand of hard Manitoba wheat flour, and it was among the most widely distributed cookbooks in Canadian homes in the first half of the twentieth century — which is why the flour is never measured here, only praised. "Without eggs" was a common heading in an era when eggs were seasonal and expensive, dearest in winter, and molasses-and-soda doughs of this kind were one way of managing the months when hens laid little. The title's "Like We Buy" presumably points at the thin, dark commercial ginger biscuit sold from shop tins, reproduced at home. The closing note about using "the first oven heat" belongs to a wood-fired range, where the fire was hottest at the start of the day's baking and the cook planned her baking to march down the temperature scale.