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Ginger Snaps (Without Shortening)
2 eggs. 1 cup molasses 1 cup sugar 2 teaspoons lemon extract 2 teaspoons soda 1 teaspoon cream of tartar 1 tablespoon ginger Five Roses flour to stiffen.
Mix together and let stand ½ hour.
Then stiffen, roll and bake. These will suit people with delicate stomachs. 13131
A fatless snap of the sort that turns out hard and brittle rather than chewy — the whole structure comes from molasses, sugar and flour, so the flour quantity is the variable the recipe leaves to your judgement.
- "Flour to stiffen"The original gives no figure because the cook was expected to feel it. Expect roughly 3½ to 4½ cups for a dough firm enough to roll thin without sticking; add it in stages, since molasses varies in moisture. This is the one measurement in the recipe that is genuinely open, and no conversion can settle it.
- No oven temperature givenBake at 350F. Thin snaps take 8 to 10 minutes and are done when the surface looks dry and set — they crisp as they cool, so pulling them at the firm-but-not-dark stage is right.
- Soda and cream of tartarAn acid and an alkali paired at the bench, the same chemistry as commercial baking powder. Here the soda is well in excess of what the cream of tartar can neutralise, and the remainder reacts with the acid in the molasses, which is what darkens the dough and gives the snap its flavour.
- The half-hour restNote the order: the mixture stands for half an hour and only then is the flour worked in ("Then stiffen"). The rest therefore happens before the dough exists, and the recipe treats it as a step rather than an option.
- Roll thinWithout shortening there is nothing to tenderise the crumb, so a thick cooky bakes into something closer to a brick. About 1/8 inch is the target; a hard snap is the intended result, not a fault.
- Lemon extractTwo teaspoons reads as a great deal by modern habit, and the lemon is there to cut the molasses. A teaspoon of extract plus the grated zest of a lemon gives a closer approximation of the intent.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cooking molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and will overwhelm the ginger. Ground ginger is meant here — a tablespoon is assertive but correct for a snap.
- YieldAbout five to six dozen 2-inch cookies. They keep for weeks in a tin and in fact improve after a day or two.
Fatless ginger snaps show up repeatedly in North American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the closing line here "these will suit people with delicate stomachs" is telling: fats were often thought to be the hard-to-digest element in baked goods, so a cooky built on molasses and flour alone was offered as an invalid or nursery food, alongside arrowroot biscuits and plain sponge. The Five Roses Cook Book, issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and distributed with sacks of its flour, was assembled largely from recipes submitted by Canadian housewives, which accounts for the loose "flour to stiffen" instruction: contributors wrote as they cooked. Molasses was the cheap sweetener of the period and ginger the standard warm spice of the cooky jar, a pairing that reaches back through British gingerbread to the medieval spice trade.