Ginger Snaps
One cupful of lard, 1 cupful of sugar, 1 cupful of molasses, 1 cupful of water, a little salt, 1 tablespoonful of ginger, 1 teaspoonful of soda, and 1 teaspoonful of cream of tartar, roll thin and bake quickly.
A workable ginger snap dough, but the printed ingredient list omits the flour entirely — you are expected to know that you add it until the dough rolls. Read the notes before starting.
- The missing flourNo quantity is given, and there is no honest way to reconstruct one exactly. With this much liquid (a cup of water plus a cup of molasses) expect somewhere in the range of 6 to 7 cups of flour, added gradually until the dough is stiff enough to roll thin without sticking. Hold back rather than overshoot; a dry dough gives tough, pale snaps.
- "Bake quickly"The recipe gives no temperature. A quick oven was generally reckoned somewhere in the 400-450F range. Thin snaps on a heavy sheet need roughly 6 to 8 minutes at that heat — they should still look faintly soft in the centre when you pull them, and they crisp as they cool.
- Roll thin means thinAn eighth of an inch or less. Thickness is much of the difference between a snap and a soft ginger cookie.
- Soda and cream of tartarSoda with cream of tartar was the period way of mixing a leavener at home rather than buying prepared baking powder. Roughly two teaspoons of modern baking powder can stand in, and molasses is acidic enough that the soda alone will also work.
- LardA cup is about 200 g. Lard makes the shortest, snappiest cookie and is still sold; butter or shortening in equal volume both work, with butter browning faster.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cooking molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and much darker than what this book intended.
- Chill before rollingThe dough is slack when first mixed. An hour in the refrigerator makes thin rolling far easier and keeps the snaps from spreading.
- YieldThis is a large batch by modern standards. Halve it if you have one oven and one baking sheet.
Ginger snaps belong to the long family of hard spiced biscuits that molasses made cheap in nineteenth-century America: no eggs, no milk, no butter required, and much of the sweetening supplied by molasses, one of the cheaper sweeteners on the shelf. Lard, water and molasses were pantry staples in households that bought butter sparingly, and a thin, hard, well-spiced cookie kept well. The vagueness about flour is typical rather than careless: cooks working with unstandardised flours judged by feel, and printed recipes of the period often assumed the reader would add flour "to roll." Ginger was among the cheaper imported spices, which may be part of why it, rather than cinnamon or cloves, features so heavily in plain baking of the era.