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Hotel Ginger-Snaps
One gallon molasses, two pounds brown sugar, one quart melted butter, half cup each ground cloves, mace, cinnamon and ginger, one cup soda.- Mrs. Hattie Clemmons.
This is a bakery formula, not a household recipe: it lists the wet ingredients and spices for something like twenty pounds of dough and leaves the rest to a cook who already knew what she was doing. Anyone working from it today has to supply the missing half.
- No flour is givenThe single most important omission. A hotel baker would have worked the molasses mixture with sifted flour until it made a stiff, rollable dough — for ginger snaps, roughly three parts flour by volume to one part molasses, added a few cups at a time. Nothing in the text tells you when to stop; the dough is right when it holds a sharp edge under the rolling pin and does not stick to the board.
- ScaleA gallon of molasses, two pounds of sugar and a quart of butter will produce several hundred cookies. To bring it into range, divide everything by sixteen: one cup molasses, two ounces brown sugar, four tablespoons melted butter, one and a half teaspoons each of the four spices, three teaspoons soda.
- The soda is heavyOne cup of soda to a gallon of molasses works out to about three teaspoons per cup of molasses, roughly three times the usual modern proportion. Molasses is acidic and needs soda to react with it, but at this rate the cookies are likely to taste faintly soapy and to darken sharply. Reducing to about one teaspoon per cup of molasses avoids the aftertaste, though the cookies will spread rather less.
- Melted butter, not creamedThe butter goes in warm and liquid, which is why there is no creaming step. Warm the molasses, sugar and butter together until the sugar dissolves, then let the mixture cool to lukewarm before the soda and flour go in, or the soda will exhaust itself in the pot.
- MaceStill sold, but rarely stocked; it is the lacy outer covering of the nutmeg seed and tastes like a lighter, more floral nutmeg. Ground nutmeg can stand in, used sparingly, as it is the stronger of the two.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven direction. Roll thin, an eighth of an inch, and bake in a hot oven, around 375F, for six to eight minutes. They firm as they cool, so they can come out while the centres still look slightly soft.
- Resting the doughMolasses doughs are slack when mixed and much easier to handle after several hours or overnight in the cold; a same-day batch will fight the rolling pin.
Recipes headed "hotel" turn up all through late nineteenth-century American community cookbooks, and they are usually exactly what this one is: a working baker's formula, copied down by a contributor who had it from a hotel kitchen and passed it on without translating it into household quantities. The proportions are given by the gallon and the pound because that is how a commercial baker thought — set the liquids and sweeteners, then take up flour to the desired stiffness. Molasses was a cheap sweetener in nineteenth-century American kitchens, a byproduct of the sugar trade and far less costly than refined sugar, which is why it dominates the gingerbread and cookie chapters of a book like this one while sugar appears in supporting amounts. The word "snap" for a thin, crisp spiced cookie is generally traced to a Germanic root meaning to snap or bite off.