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Ginger Snaps (Pint of molasses teacup brown)
1 pint of molasses. 1 teacup brown sugar. 1 teacup of butter and lard mixed. Beat the molasses till it looks light, then put it in the sugar; next pour in the hot butter and lard, one egg beaten light, one teacup ground ginger. Have the mixture milk-warm; work flour in briskly. Roll them and bake quickly.--Miss N. S. L.
A big, old-fashioned molasses dough with no leavening and no stated flour quantity — the cook was expected to judge by feel. A few conversions and one warning about the ginger will get you there.
- Teacup and pintA nineteenth-century teacup is about 3/4 cup, not a modern mug; some Virginia books use it interchangeably with a full cup. A pint of molasses is 2 cups.
- The ginger is the problemA teacup of ground ginger is roughly 2 to 3 ounces, which would be ferocious and gritty in a dough this size. Reducing it to 1 to 2 tablespoons brings it within modern range; treat the original figure as either a very heavy hand or a transcription of a smaller measure.
- Flour is unspecifiedExpect somewhere around 6 to 7 cups to reach a dough stiff enough to roll without sticking. Add it in stages and stop when the dough holds a sheet under the pin — over-flouring gives a dry, sandy snap rather than a brittle one.
- "Milk-warm"Blood temperature, about 100F. The melted butter and lard go in hot but the mixture must cool to this point before the flour, or the dough turns slack and greasy and the egg begins to set.
- FatThe recipe specifies only 'butter and lard mixed' and gives no proportion; half and half is one reasonable reading — about 3/4 cup total if you read the teacup at 3/4. Lard gives the short, crisp break; all-butter dough spreads more and stays chewier.
- No leaveningUnlike most later ginger snaps, there is no saleratus or soda here. The crispness comes entirely from thin rolling and a hot fast bake, so roll to about 1/8 inch or less.
- "Bake quickly"The book gives no temperature; a quick oven, in modern terms roughly 375 to 400F for 6 to 9 minutes, watching closely. They will still look soft at the edges when you pull them; the snap develops as they cool on the sheet.
- Chill before rollingAn hour in the refrigerator makes this sticky molasses dough manageable, and lets you re-roll scraps without working in more flour.
- YieldA very large batch — six to eight dozen small thin cookies. The dough keeps well wrapped and cold for several days.
Molasses ginger cakes and snaps were among the most common sweets in Southern household books, and for good reason: molasses was cheap, kept indefinitely in a jug, and needed no refined sugar, while ground ginger was one of the few spices a rural pantry could count on year-round. The word "snap" is often said to refer to the brittle break of a thin, hard-baked cake, though that is only one of several proposed derivations, and the type is generally traced to the ginger breads and hard gingerbread nuts of English baking, which arrived in the colonies early and stayed. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) was compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia housekeepers — the initialled "Miss N. S. L." here is typical — and the offhand instructions, with no flour quantity and no oven temperature, reflect a readership that had learned to bake by hand and eye at a wood range rather than from a printed formula.