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Moore's Honey Ginger Snaps
1 pint of honey, 1 teaspoonful of ginger and 1 teaspoonful of soda, dissolved in a little water and 2 eggs. Mix all, then work in all the flour possible, roll very thin and bake in a moderately hot oven. Any flavoring extracts can be added, as you may wish.
TO SPICE APPLES, PEARS or PEACHES 1 quart of best vinegar, 1 quart of honey, ½ ounce each of cloves and stick cinnamon. ounce each of cloves and stick cinnamon.
Boil all together 15 minutes, then put in the fruit, and cook tender. Put in a stone jar with enough of the syrup to cover the fruit.
It will keep as long as wanted.
Two recipes run together here: a honey ginger snap with no fat and no sugar at all, and a honey-vinegar spiced fruit. Both rely on honey as the whole sweetener, which changes how they behave.
- The hinge: how much flour"All the flour possible" is the entire recipe's method, and the quantity is not stated. A pint of honey with two eggs will take a great deal of flour -- likely well over four cups -- before the dough stops sticking and can be rolled. Work it in gradually and stop when the dough is stiff but still rollable; too much and the snaps turn hard rather than crisp.
- A pint of honeyTwo cups by volume, about 24 ounces by weight. This is the only sweetener and the only liquid of any substance in the dough, so honey quality shows directly in the finished cookie.
- No fatThere is no butter or lard in this dough, which is what makes it snap rather than crumble. It also means the cookies stick, so bake on parchment or a well-greased sheet.
- "Moderately hot oven"Roughly 375 to 400°F. Rolled very thin, the snaps need only 6 to 8 minutes and go from done to burnt quickly, since honey browns faster than granulated sugar.
- Roll very thinAn eighth of an inch or less. The whole character of a ginger snap is thinness; rolled thick, this dough bakes into something closer to a honey cake.
- SodaOrdinary baking soda, dissolved in a tablespoon or two of water before it goes in, as the recipe directs. The honey is mildly acidic and supplies something for it to react with. The recipe specifies one teaspoon for this quantity.
- YieldNot stated. Rolled thin and cut at about 2 inches, expect six to eight dozen.
- The spiced fruit: a typesetting errorThe line "ounce each of cloves and stick cinnamon" is a repeat of the preceding line with the fraction dropped in printing. Read it as one instruction: ½ ounce each, whole cloves and stick cinnamon, tied in cheesecloth if you would rather not fish them out.
- The spiced fruit: "it will keep as long as wanted"Equal parts vinegar and honey give a strongly acid syrup, and cooked fruit stored under it in a covered crock was a normal keeping method. It is not sealed canning by any current standard. Refrigerate it and treat it as a few weeks' pickle, or follow a tested waterbath recipe if you want it shelf-stable.
Honey recipes cluster together in books of this period at a time when honey was still, more often than not, a farm product rather than a grocery one, and cooks with a hive or a beekeeping neighbor needed ways to use it that did not simply substitute it for sugar. A fatless honey snap of this kind belongs to that tradition: eggs and honey bound with as much flour as they will take, leavened with soda, and rolled paper-thin. Who "Moore" was the recipe does not say. The spiced fruit that follows uses the same pantry logic — honey standing in for the sugar of a conventional sweet pickle, with vinegar and whole spices doing the preserving work that a household would otherwise have entrusted to a heavy sugar syrup.