Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Ginger Snaps
Ginger Snaps
Put one pint of molasses into a saucepan with a teaspoonful of bicarbonate of soda, two tablespoonfuls of ground ginger and half a pound of butter, and boil until all are thoroughly mixed. Let it cool and then add sufficient flour to make it into a soft dough; work it well, cut it into small cakes and bake in a slow oven until done.
A molasses-and-butter dough of the old boiled type, given with almost no measurements for flour or time. The proportions are sound; the technique needs a little translation.
- The hinge: roll thinThickness does most of the work here. Roll the dough to about 1/8 inch or thinner and the cookies dry crisp; at 1/4 inch you get a soft molasses cookie instead.
- Slow ovenRoughly 300 to 325F. At that range the cakes dry rather than brown, which is what produces the brittle snap. Figure somewhere around 12 to 15 minutes for thin rounds; they firm as they cool, so pull them while still slightly yielding.
- QuantitiesA pint of molasses is 2 cups; half a pound of butter is 2 sticks. Two tablespoons of ground ginger is not a misprint, though it reads as a lot by modern standards.
- "Sufficient flour" Genuinely unspecified. For this volume of liquid the figure is likely to fall somewhere in the range of 5 to 7 cups, added gradually until the dough stops sticking to the hands. Stop as soon as it holds together; excess flour makes the snaps hard rather than crisp.
- Watch the sodaBicarbonate of soda dropped into hot molasses foams up violently. Use a pan several times deeper than the liquid, and stir it in off the heat before returning to the fire.
- "Boil until thoroughly mixed"This means bring it just to a boil so the butter melts into the molasses, not a sustained hard boil, which will drive the syrup toward candy stages and give a dough you cannot roll.
- CoolingThe dough is unworkable warm. Let it cool fully, and an hour in the refrigerator makes rolling and cutting far easier.
- YieldThis is a large batch, well beyond a single modern tray; expect a great many two-inch snaps. They keep for weeks in a tin and stale by softening, not drying.
Ginger snaps belong to a very old European family of hard spiced biscuits kept for their keeping qualities, and by the nineteenth century the American version had settled on molasses as its sweetener and bicarbonate of soda as its lift. The soda does double duty here: it aerates, and it neutralizes some of the acid in the molasses, which deepens the color and encourages the dark, faintly bitter edge associated with the style. Molasses was still the everyday sweetener of the American household at the turn of the century, cheaper than refined sugar and dependable in the pantry, which is why so many recipes of the period build their cookies around it.