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Lemon Snaps
Beat together one cup of sugar, two-thirds cup of butter, adding two eggs, one-half teaspoon of soda dissolved in four tablespoons of hot water, and one tablespoon of lemon juice with grated rind of two lemons. Add sufficient flour to roll soft and thin and bake in a quick oven.
A plain rolled butter cookie carried entirely by lemon zest. The only real difficulty is the flour, which the original leaves to judgment.
- The hinge: roll it thinSnaps are crisp because they are thin, not because of any ingredient. Roll to about 1/8 inch or less and cut with a 2-inch cutter; anything thicker bakes into a soft tea cookie.
- Flour is unspecified"Sufficient flour to roll soft and thin" is genuinely open. Expect somewhere around 2 3/4 to 3 1/2 cups, added gradually until the dough just stops sticking to the hands. Chill it an hour before rolling, since the dough is soft and warm butter makes it unmanageable.
- Quick ovenRoughly 400-425F. At that heat thin rounds bake in only a few minutes and go from pale to burnt quickly, so bake one test tray and stand at the oven. If the edges brown before the centres set, drop the heat.
- Soda in hot waterDissolving soda in liquid was a common way to distribute it evenly in home baking of this period. Here it mostly encourages browning and spread rather than lift; one tablespoon of lemon juice is not enough acid to neutralise all of the half teaspoon of soda.
- Butter and saltTwo-thirds cup is about 10 tablespoons. Butter of the period was often salted for keeping; with unsalted butter add 1/4 teaspoon of salt or the lemon flavour reads flat.
- The zest does the workTwo lemons gives roughly two tablespoons of grated rind. Grate only the yellow, and rub the zest into the sugar before creaming with the butter to draw out the oils.
- YieldSeveral dozen 2-inch cookies, depending on how thin they are rolled. Cool them on a rack, then store airtight; they crisp further as they cool and go soft again in humid air.
Lemon snaps belong to the large family of nineteenth-century rolled snaps and "jumbles" -- thin crisp cookies flavoured with whatever was cheap and keepable, most often ginger, molasses, caraway or citrus peel. Lemons were among the few fresh fruits that travelled well and kept for weeks: the rind and juice flavoured cakes, puddings, drinks and cookies year round when fresh berries and stone fruit could not. The dissolved soda is a common enough touch in home baking of the period, though it dates the recipe less precisely than it might seem, since the practice persisted well after commercial baking powder became available. Nothing in it wastes the fruit -- juice, rind and all go into the dough.