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Ginger Snaps
Two cups of molasses; one cup of butter or lard; one teaspoon of soda; one teaspoon of ginger. Heat all until melted, and then add barely enough flour to admit of rolling the dough out. Bake in a quick oven.
A four-ingredient snap that depends entirely on how thin you roll it and how briefly it bakes. The flour quantity is left to the cook, which is the only real difficulty.
- Roll thin, or they are not snapsThe crispness comes from thickness, not from the recipe. Roll to about 1/8 inch; at 1/4 inch the same dough bakes soft and cakey.
- "A quick oven"Roughly 400-425F. At that heat a thin molasses cookie bakes fast, in the region of 5 to 8 minutes, and will scorch at the edges shortly after, so bake one test tray and watch it. They firm up as they cool and should still look slightly soft when you pull them.
- How much flour"Barely enough to admit of rolling" is genuinely open-ended and depends on your molasses. Expect somewhere around 6 to 7 cups for this quantity of liquid; add it a cup at a time and stop as soon as the dough holds together without sticking to your hands.
- Heating the molassesMelt the fat into the molasses over low heat and take it off before it simmers. Stir the soda in while it is still hot -- it will foam up -- then let the mixture cool to warm before adding flour, or the dough turns slack and greasy.
- Butter or lardEither works; lard gives a shorter, crisper snap and butter gives more flavour. A "cup" here is a volume measure -- about 8 oz / 225 g for butter, somewhat less for lard.
- MolassesUse a dark table molasses rather than blackstrap, which is bitter and too strong here. Light or "mild" molasses gives a paler, sweeter snap.
- What is missingThere is no salt and no egg. A half teaspoon of salt improves the dough noticeably; if salted butter was used, the original would have carried some salt already.
- Chill before rollingAn hour in the refrigerator makes this dough far easier to handle and lets you roll it thin without tearing. Work with a quarter of it at a time and keep the rest cold.
- YieldThis makes a very large batch; the count depends entirely on how thin you roll and the size of your cutter. They keep for weeks in a tin.
Ginger snaps belong to the long family of hard spiced molasses biscuits -- snaps, gingerbread nuts, brandy snaps -- that spread through British and American baking once cheap West Indian molasses and imported ginger were both within reach of an ordinary household. The name is generally traced to the sound the biscuit makes when broken, and keeping quality is much of the point of the type: a stiff, sugar-heavy dough baked dry stores for weeks in a tin, which made it a standard item in the biscuit box and the lunch pail. The recipe's brevity -- four ingredients, no measured flour, no timing -- assumes a cook who already knew what the dough should feel like under a rolling pin.