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Ginger Snaps
Bring to a boil 2 cups of honey and 1 cup of butter or 3/4 cup of lard and then cool. butter or ½ cup of lard and then cool.
Add 3 teaspoons of soda and beat until very light. Put two tablespoons of ginger into the flour, then pour in the butter and honey and mix stiff enough to roll without sticking.
Bake in a rather quick oven.
A honey ginger snap of the old boiled-syrup type: the fat and sweetener are cooked together, cooled, then stiffened with flour until the dough rolls. The original text is garbled by a printer's repetition and gives no flour quantity, so expect to judge the dough by feel.
- The duplicated lineThe second half-sentence ("butter or ½ cup of lard and then cool") appears to be a printer's repetition, though its lard quantity differs from the first (½ cup against ¾ cup). The safer reading is the first, fuller version: 2 cups honey with either 1 cup butter or 3/4 cup lard.
- Flour is unmeasuredNo quantity is given anywhere, and "stiff enough to roll without sticking" is the only guide. With 2 cups honey and a cup of fat, expect somewhere in the range of 6 to 8 cups of flour; add it a cup at a time and stop when the dough holds a rolled sheet.
- Cool the syrup properlyThis is the hinge. Honey boiled with butter is well above 220F; flour stirred in hot will gelatinise and the soda will spend itself before baking. Let the mixture come down to lukewarm before the soda goes in.
- SodaThree teaspoons sounds excessive but is in scale for a batch this size, and honey is acidic enough to react with it. Beat "until very light" after adding it, as the recipe directs.
- GingerTwo tablespoons of dried ground ginger, sifted through the flour rather than stirred into the wet mixture so it distributes evenly. Taste a pinch and scale back if yours is aggressive.
- "A rather quick oven"A quick oven is usually reckoned at about 400-425F; for thin rolled cookies, bake around 400F for 8 to 10 minutes. Honey doughs colour fast, so watch the edges rather than the clock.
- Rolling and snapRoll thin, about 1/8 inch, if you want them to actually snap. They will feel soft leaving the oven and harden as they cool on a rack.
- YieldThe full quantity makes a great many cookies, on the order of eight to ten dozen thin ones. Halving it is reasonable for a modern household, and the dough keeps well wrapped and chilled.
Ginger snaps belong to the long European family of hard spiced biscuits leavened with an alkali rather than eggs, and in American cookbooks of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries they were most often built on molasses. This version uses honey instead. Honey and soda are a natural pair, since honey is mildly acidic and needs no added cream of tartar to raise the dough. The recipe offers a choice between butter and lard.