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Calumet Ginger Snaps
1 cup molasses 2 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder 3⅓ cups flour 2 teaspoons ginger 1/2 cup butter or drippings 1½ teaspoons salt Boil molasses two minutes and pour on butter; cool. Sift together thoroughly flour, baking powder, ginger and salt and add. Chill, roll on a floured board as thin as possible using a small part of the dough at a time. Cut into a shape and bake in a moderate oven. 1/3 cup butter 1/2 cup sugar 2 eggs 1/2 cup flour (See illustration, page 22.)
This is an advertising-booklet recipe, and the ingredient list has come apart in typesetting: molasses is called for in the method but never quantified, and the four lines at the end belong to a different recipe on the same page. What follows is what a competent cook needs to reconstruct it.
- The missing molassesThe method says to boil molasses and pour it over the butter, but no amount is printed. Comparable molasses snaps of the period use about 1 cup of molasses to 3 1/3 cups flour; treat that as an inference, not as the book's instruction.
- The stray last four lines"1/3 cup butter, 1/2 cup sugar, 2 eggs, 1/2 cup flour" does not belong to the snaps: butter is already listed above, and 2 eggs with half a cup of flour would ruin a thin snap. It appears to be a fragment of another recipe from the same page that ran into this one. Ignore it here.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperature; "moderate" in this period is usually taken as roughly 350-375F. Rolled paper-thin, these need only 6 to 10 minutes; pull them when the edges darken and the centers still look slightly soft, since they crisp as they cool.
- Calumet baking powderA phosphate powder (later of the sodium aluminium sulphate-phosphate type, i.e. slower-acting in the oven as well as in the bowl), the company's own product and the reason the booklet exists. Any modern double-acting baking powder can stand in one for one.
- DrippingsThe alternative to butter means rendered beef or pork fat saved from roasting. It gives a savory, slightly meaty snap that was ordinary at the time; lard or shortening is the closest easy stand-in, butter the safest.
- Why boil the molassesTwo minutes at a boil drives off some water and concentrates the sugar, which helps toward a crisp rather than bendy cookie, though thin rolling matters more. Pouring it hot onto the butter melts the fat evenly; the mixture must then cool before the dry ingredients go in, as the recipe directs.
- Chilling and rollingThe dough is soft and sticky warm and stiff cold. The recipe says only to chill it and to roll a small part at a time; working with a quarter and keeping the rest cold is a practical reading of that. The thinner you roll, the crisper the result.
- YieldUnstated. This quantity of dough rolled thin and cut with a 2-inch cutter gives roughly five to six dozen.
Reliable Recipes was a promotional cookbook issued by the Calumet Baking Powder Company of Chicago, one of the successful American chemical-leavening firms that grew up in the decades after the Civil War. Booklets like this were given away or sent for a few cents in postage, and their purpose is plain in the recipes themselves: the brand name appears in the title and in the ingredient list, and the powder is measured in "level teaspoons" -- a distinction the makers of the newer, stronger powders had reason to press, since heaped spoons of the older homemade saleratus mixtures were not equivalent. Ginger snaps were an obvious inclusion. Molasses and ginger were cheap, kept well, and the dough tolerated rough handling, which made the cookie a fixture of American home baking and of commercial bakeries long before this booklet was printed. The option of drippings in place of butter suggests an audience expected to be thrifty with fat.