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Ginger Snaps (Cupful butter tablespoonful)
1 cupful butter. 1 tablespoonful ginger. 1 teaspoonful soda, in 1 pint boiling molasses.
Stir and let it cool; add sifted flour enough to make a dough; roll thin and bake.--Mrs. S. B.
A terse nineteenth-century formula that assumes the cook knows what a stiff molasses dough should feel like. The flour is left to your judgment, so work in stages and stop while the dough is still just barely manageable.
- The quantities in modern termsA pint of molasses is 2 cups (about 24 oz by weight); a cupful of butter is 8 oz, or two sticks. Expect to need roughly 5 to 6 cups of flour to reach a rollable dough.
- Soda into boiling molassesThis is the hinge. Add the teaspoon of soda to the molasses off the heat and in a pan at least three times the volume of the liquid — it will foam up violently and can climb out of a small saucepan. The acid in the molasses is what activates it, and that reaction is the only leavening here.
- Melt the butter with the molassesThe compressed wording most likely intends the butter to go into the hot molasses so it melts; on that reading, "stir and let it cool" means cool to lukewarm, not cold. Flour stirred into scalding molasses tends to gum, and butter added once the mixture is cold will stay in lumps.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. For thin snaps, 350-375F works; thin molasses dough scorches quickly, so watch the edges rather than the clock.
- Rolling and timing"Roll thin" means about 1/8 inch or less; thickness matters as much as baking time in deciding whether these snap or bend. Bake 8 to 10 minutes; they will still be soft coming out of the oven and crisp as they cool on a rack.
- Chill the dough firstWith this much butter the dough is slack when freshly mixed. An hour in the refrigerator makes it far easier to roll thin, and rolling on a lightly floured board rather than adding more flour to the mass keeps the snaps from turning tough.
- YieldNot stated in the original. With a pint of molasses and a cup of butter this is a very large batch, and it halves cleanly.
Ginger snaps belong to the long family of molasses-and-spice biscuits that dominated American home baking before cheap white sugar; molasses was the standard sweetener in Southern pantries well into the nineteenth century, and ginger was among the few spices reliably stocked in quantity. The soda-into-molasses trick is sometimes read as a rough marker of date — pearlash and then saleratus gave way to bicarbonate of soda over the middle decades of the century — though molasses-and-soda recipes remained common long after the 1870s, so recipes like this one, which lean on the acidity of molasses rather than added cream of tartar or sour milk, can only loosely be placed in that transition. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) was compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named and initialed Virginia housekeepers. One can only guess why the instructions are so compressed: perhaps "Mrs. S. B." was writing down her own shorthand for other experienced cooks rather than for beginners, with the unmeasured flour a possible sign of it.