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Ginger-Snaps (One pound and six ounces flour)
One pound and six ounces flour, four of sugar, eight of butter, six of preserved orange peel, half pint of molasses, one tea-spoon soda dissolved in two table-spoons boiling water, one tea-spoon cloves, two of ginger. Soften the butter and mix it with the sugar and molasses, add the spices, orange peel and soda, beat well and stir in the flour, flour the board and roll the paste as thin as possible, cut in circles and bake in a very quick oven. This quantity makes one hundred and twenty-nine snaps, about three inches across. - In the Kitchen.
A large batch cookie given by weight rather than volume, which is the easier way to work it. The whole point is thinness: rolled thick, this dough bakes into a soft molasses cookie rather than a snap.
- The weights in cups1 lb 6 oz flour is about 5 cups; 4 oz sugar is a scant 2/3 cup; 8 oz butter is 2 sticks (1 cup). A half pint of molasses is 1 cup. If you have a scale, use the weights as printed.
- A very quick ovenRoughly 425-450F; the old oven words were never standardized, so treat this as an approximation. At three inches across and rolled paper-thin, the snaps should color in about 5 to 7 minutes, so bake one tray as a test and pull them when the edges darken.
- Roll thin, and chill firstThis is the hinge. Softened butter plus a cup of molasses makes a slack dough; refrigerate it an hour or more before rolling, work with a quarter of it at a time, and keep the board and pin well floured.
- Preserved orange peelCandied peel, sold in tubs or by weight at the holidays. Six ounces is a lot of it, so chop it fine, or it will tear the thin sheet of dough. Candied citron or lemon peel substitutes directly.
- The sodaOne teaspoon dissolved in two tablespoons boiling water and added to the molasses. The molasses supplies the acid; nothing further is needed, and the dissolved-in-water step is worth keeping so the soda does not streak.
- SpicesTwo teaspoons ginger and one of cloves for five cups of flour reads mild to modern taste. Doubling the ginger is defensible.
- YieldThe stated 129 three-inch snaps assumes genuinely thin rolling; expect noticeably fewer if the dough is any thicker. Halve the recipe unless you want a tin that lasts a month, which these will, stored airtight.
The name describes the result: a snap is a biscuit rolled thin enough to break with a clean crack. Ginger and molasses were cheap flavorings of the nineteenth-century American pantry, both reaching American kitchens through West Indies trade, and molasses-and-ginger doughs turn up across the period in every register from plain farmhouse cookies to spiced, peel-studded versions like this one. The candied orange peel suggests a more prosperous kitchen. The credit line "In the Kitchen" points to Elizabeth S. Miller's cookbook of that title, published in 1875; compiled American cookbooks of the era commonly drew on printed predecessors and on contributed household recipes, and this entry names its source at the end.