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Ginger-Snaps (Two cups molasses one of lard)
Two cups molasses, one of lard, one table-spoon soda; one of ginger, flour to roll stiff. - Miss Mary Gallagher.
A four-ingredient snap of the kind that assumes the cook already knows what the dough should feel like. The proportions work, but the flour quantity and the baking are left entirely to judgement.
- Flour, unstated"Flour to roll stiff" with 2 cups molasses and 1 cup lard lands somewhere near 5 to 6 cups, added a cup at a time until the dough is firm and no longer tacky. Stop as soon as it rolls cleanly; more flour past that point gives a dry, sandy snap rather than a crisp one.
- LardOne cup of lard is about 7 1/2 oz by weight. Leaf lard or a modern rendered lard gives the shortest, crispest result; butter can be substituted at equal volume but browns faster and spreads more.
- Soda, not baking powderThe single tablespoon of soda is doing double duty as leavening and as a neutraliser for the acid in the molasses. Sift it with the first of the flour so it disperses; a lump of dry soda leaves a soapy yellow spot.
- MolassesUse unsulphured dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is markedly more bitter than the table molasses of the period. Warming the molasses slightly makes it easier to beat into the lard.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Snaps of this type bake at 350F for 8 to 10 minutes, until the surface has cracked and the edges are set. They will still be soft when they come out and crisp as they cool.
- Rolling and cuttingRoll thin, about 1/8 inch, on a lightly floured board; thickness is what decides snap versus chew. Chilling the dough an hour makes the thin rolling much easier.
- GingerOne tablespoon of ground ginger across this quantity of dough is modest by modern taste. Ground ginger loses potency quickly, so an older jar will read as barely spiced.
- YieldA very large batch: rolled thin and cut small, this quantity of dough makes many dozens of snaps. Stored airtight they keep for weeks and were meant to.
Ginger-snaps sit in the molasses-and-soda family of American cookies that came into their own once cheap saleratus reached rural kitchens in the mid-nineteenth century: no eggs, no milk, no sugar, nothing that spoils, and long keeping in a stone jar or tin. The distinction between a soft gingerbread and a thin, hard snap was a matter of how much flour the cook worked in and how thin she rolled it, not of a different recipe. The word snap is often said to come from the brittle crack of the cooled cookie, though this is folk tradition rather than settled derivation, and a Low German or Dutch origin has also been proposed. The attribution to Miss Mary Gallagher is typical of the book's method: recipes were solicited from contributors by name, and the book is largely a reworking of Buckeye Cookery with contributors drawn from well beyond the South, so a named attribution records one household's practice rather than a professional's standard formula.