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Grantham Ginger Snaps, English
12 ounces of white sugar. 8 ounces of butter. 8 eggs. 1 teacupful of milk-small. 2 ounces of ground ginger. 2 teaspoonfuls of baking powder. 1 1/2 pounds of flour.
Mix up in the usual way for cookies. Sift sugar over before cutting out the cakes.
It is generally best to make the dough for all kinds of cookies and sugar cake as soft as it can possibly be rolled out. Different persons make very different cakes of these sorts from the same receipts, and the common fault is too much flour in the dough. The baking powder too is responsible for some of the changes. With too much powder the cakes run into each other and lose the good round shape they ought to have.
A baker's formula given in weights, with no oven temperature and no yield. The closing paragraph is the real instruction: keep the dough as soft as it can be rolled, and be sparing with the leavening.
- Weights in modern terms12 oz sugar is about 1 3/4 cups; 8 oz butter is two sticks; 1 1/2 lb flour is roughly 5 1/2 cups. Weigh the flour if you can — the whole point of the final paragraph is that scooping cups packs in too much.
- The small teacupfulTeacup measures in books of this period vary, and are commonly reckoned anywhere from about 4 to 6 fl oz; "small" suggests the low end. With eight eggs already in the bowl the milk may not all be needed; hold some back and add only enough to bring the dough together.
- GingerTwo ounces of ground ginger is somewhere between a half and two-thirds of a cup — fierce by modern palates. Half that amount gives a sharp but recognisable snap.
- OvenNone is given. As a modern starting point, a moderate oven around 350F gives a softer, cakier biscuit, while a slower 325F for 12 to 15 minutes dries them further; neither figure is the book's.
- Baking powderThe warning about cakes running together is worth heeding, because modern double-acting powder gives a second lift in the oven that the older single-acting powders did not. Two level teaspoons for 1 1/2 lb flour is already restrained — do not round it up.
- Sifting sugar before cuttingSugar is dusted over the rolled sheet, not the cut rounds, so it rolls into the surface and gives the crackled top. Do it after the final roll and just before the cutter goes in.
- Handling a soft doughDough this slack is easiest chilled an hour, then rolled between sheets of paper. Heavy flouring of the board works still more flour into the dough, which is the fault the author complains of.
- YieldAround 2 lb of sugar, butter and eggs to 1 1/2 lb flour makes a very large batch — six to seven dozen small cakes. It halves cleanly, using four eggs.
Grantham gingerbread belongs to the Lincolnshire market town of Grantham, and the local biscuit is traditionally described as pale, domed, hollow inside and brittle — its creation is generally traced, on local tradition rather than documentary evidence, to a Grantham baker in the middle of the eighteenth century who is said to have mistaken one ingredient for another. The English version recorded here has travelled a long way from that thin, whitish original: the eggs and butter are lavish, and the result would be closer to an American rolled sugar cooky with a heavy hand of ginger. That drift is characteristic of trade manuals like this one, where a foreign name attached to a formula signalled a style to the customer while the working baker adjusted the proportions to the flour, the ovens and the tastes in front of him.