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Rich Ginger Snaps
2 cups sugar 2 cups molasses 2 eggs (well beaten) 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons ginger.
Mix above ingredients and set pan on stove until contents are as hot as the finger can bear. Then add the following: 3 teaspoons soda dissolved in 2 tablespoons vinegar Five Roses flour to roll.
Add the flour quickly and cut. Use only as much flour as is necessary and leave the pan in a warm place and take only part of the dough onto the board to roll at one time. Bake in very quick oven. 2 eggs
A very large batch of rolled molasses snaps, leavened by soda slaked in vinegar. Two things decide whether it works: the temperature of the molasses mixture when the soda goes in, and restraint with the flour.
- "As hot as the finger can bear"Roughly 115-125F. Warm enough to thin the molasses and dissolve the sugar, not hot enough to scramble the eggs. Stir constantly over low heat and take it off before it steams.
- Soda and vinegarThe 3 teaspoons of soda are far more than the vinegar can neutralize, which is the point: the vinegar dissolves the soda for even distribution, and the excess soda reacts with the acid in the molasses to give lift and the characteristic dark, cracked snap. Work fast once it is in, since the reaction begins immediately.
- Unspecified flour"Flour to roll" with this much liquid means somewhere around 7 to 8 cups of all-purpose, but the real measure is feel: stop as soon as the dough will just hold a rolled sheet. Extra flour gives a hard, dull cookie rather than a crisp one.
- Why the dough stays warmMolasses dough stiffens sharply as it cools and turns unrollable. Keeping the bulk of it in a warm place and rolling a piece at a time is not fussiness, it is the only way to get through a batch this size.
- "Very quick oven"450-475F in period terms. For thin snaps, 425F is the practical setting on a modern oven; molasses and sugar this concentrated scorch on the bottom in under a minute of inattention. Bake 6-8 minutes, until the surface is cracked and the edges set, and let them crisp on the sheet.
- GingerTwo tablespoons of ground ginger is assertive by modern standards but correct for a snap. Ground spice loses potency fast, so old ginger will read as merely brown and sweet.
- Rolling thicknessAn eighth of an inch or less. Anything thicker bakes into a soft molasses cooky, which is a different thing entirely.
- YieldWith 2 cups each of sugar and molasses this makes a very large batch, on the order of ten dozen or more small snaps depending on how thin they are rolled. Halving it is reasonable for a household kitchen.
- The stray lineThe "2 eggs" printed after the baking instruction appears to be a repeat of the eggs listed at the top, whether a typesetting or transcription artifact. Use two eggs in total.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal to promote its Five Roses brand flour, and much of its contents came from recipes submitted by Canadian housewives who used it 4 which is why the flour is named in the method but never measured, and why instructions like "as hot as the finger can bear" survive unedited. Ginger snaps of this kind belong to the long North American tradition of molasses baking, where molasses was the cheap everyday sweetener and its acidity paired naturally with soda for leavening; slaking soda in vinegar was a familiar practice that persisted alongside, not only before, commercial baking powder. Snaps like these were baked in quantity, stored in a tin or stoneware jar, and expected to keep for weeks, which crisp low-moisture snaps do better than almost any other cookie.