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Ginger Snaps
3 cups flour ½ teaspoon soda 1 tablespoon ginger 2 teaspoons salt Boil shortening and molasses two minutes. Add remaining ingredients, mixed and sifted. Beat well; chill over night. Roll very thin. Shape with knife or cutter. Bake on buttered pan in quick oven eight to ten minutes.
A stiff molasses dough of the old school: hot syrup poured over the dry ingredients, rested overnight, then rolled paper-thin. Two things need flagging before you start — the ingredient list as printed is incomplete, and the salt is out of line with modern practice.
- Missing quantitiesThe transcription lists only flour, soda, ginger and salt, yet the method calls for boiled shortening and molasses. Those two amounts are genuinely absent from the text and cannot be reconstructed with any confidence; a comparable period ginger snap runs roughly a half cup of fat to a cup of molasses for three cups of flour, but that is a guess, not this recipe.
- The saltTwo teaspoons for three cups of flour is about four times what a modern cookie dough carries. Whether that is what was intended or a slip in the printing cannot be established from the text; treat it as suspect and consider scaling it back.
- Quick ovenGenerally reckoned around 400-425F. At that heat, thin snaps colour fast; eight to ten minutes is plausible for a genuinely thin sheet but check at six.
- Boiling the fat and molassesThe two-minute boil drives off water from the syrup. Pour it hot over the sifted dry ingredients and mix at once; the snap in the finished biscuit comes chiefly from the low moisture and the very thin rolling.
- The overnight chillNot optional. A warm molasses dough is unrollable; cold it goes firm enough to take to an eighth of an inch or less. Roll a portion at a time and return the rest to the refrigerator.
- Soda, not baking powderHalf a teaspoon of soda works on the acid in the molasses and helps the cookie brown; at that quantity it does little lifting. Do not substitute baking powder.
- Buttered panModern parchment does the job better and prevents the sugar-heavy edges from welding to the sheet.
- YieldThree cups of flour rolled thin gives a large batch; depending on the cutter, something on the order of five or six dozen small snaps. They keep well in a tin and crisp back in a low oven if they soften.
Ginger snaps belong to the long line of hard, keeping gingerbreads that predate the soft cake gingerbread most Americans now think of first — spice, molasses, a little fat, and almost no liquid, rolled thin so the finished biscuit dries to a snap. The name is usually explained by the sound or brittleness of the biscuit, though this is traditional explanation rather than established etymology. Molasses did the sweetening in New England kitchens well into the twentieth century because it was cheap and plentiful through the West Indies trade, and the acid in it paired naturally with saleratus and later baking soda. Lowney's Cook Book was issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, as a general household cookbook that also promoted its own products; plain staples like this sat alongside the cocoa and chocolate recipes that were the book's commercial reason for existing.