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Molasses
Mix flour, sugar, ginger, and salt. Work in butter, using tips of fingers, and add just enough molasses to hold ingredients together. Let stand over night to get thoroughly chilled. Roll very thin, shape, and bake in a moderate oven.
This is a rolled molasses ginger snap dough, mixed like a shortcrust: dry ingredients first, fat rubbed in, then just enough molasses to bring it together. The instructions are complete but the quantities are not stated, so treat the method as a guide and take proportions from a modern molasses snap recipe.
- No quantities givenThe text supplies flour, sugar, ginger, salt, butter and molasses in order of use but no amounts. Any figure offered here would be invention; take proportions from a modern molasses snap recipe, adding molasses by feel until the crumbs just cohere.
- Moderate ovenRead as somewhere around 350 to 375F. Cookies rolled this thin colour fast, so start checking early, around 6 to 8 minutes, and pull them when the edges darken but the centres still look soft.
- Molasses, not blackstrapPeriod molasses was the mild or dark cane syrup left from sugar refining. Use unsulphured dark molasses; blackstrap is bitter and much less sweet, and will throw the balance of the dough.
- Add the molasses slowlyThis is the hinge. The dough should just hold when squeezed, no wetter. Too much molasses and it will spread in the oven and stick to the rolling pin no matter how long it chills.
- The overnight chill mattersCold butter is what lets the dough go paper-thin without tearing. Wrap it and refrigerate; if it has gone rock hard, let it sit ten minutes before rolling rather than warming it.
- Rolling very thinAn eighth of an inch or less gives the snap this dough is aiming for. Roll between sheets of parchment, and chill the cut shapes again briefly before baking if the kitchen is warm.
- GingerGround dried ginger, and be generous; this style of thin snap is heavily spiced. Fresh ginger adds moisture and will not give the same dry heat.
- StorageBaked thin and cooled completely, these should keep well in a tin. Any softening means moisture has got in.
Molasses was an everyday sweetener in American and British kitchens through the nineteenth century, cheaper than refined sugar and, in the United States, tied up with the sugar and rum trade of the Caribbean. Thin, hard, heavily gingered molasses cakes of this kind were a keeping cookie, and they turn up in domestic manuals of the period under names like ginger snaps, ginger thins or simply molasses cakes. The rubbed-in butter method here is the same technique used for pastry, which is why the dough demands a long cold rest before it will roll thin without tearing.