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Ginger Snaps
Mrs Upham.
One pint of molasses, one cup of butter, a teaspoonful each of ginger, cloves, and soda; put all over the fire together and let it come to a boil, using a large vessel, as it is likely to foam over; when nearly cool add flour enough to make a stiff dough; roll out and cut into small cakes.
A boiled-molasses dough of the old school: no eggs, no sugar, no stated oven. Nearly everything the modern cook needs has to be supplied, and the two things the recipe does warn about — the foaming and the stiffness of the dough — are the two things that matter.
- The foam is the hingeBaking soda dropped into hot, acidic molasses erupts immediately. Use a pot at least three times the volume of the liquid, add the soda off direct heat if you can, and stir it down before returning to the boil. Mrs Upham's warning about a large vessel is not decorative.
- A pint of molassesTwo cups, 16 fl oz, roughly 660-680 g by weight. Use unsulphured dark molasses; blackstrap is more bitter than the West Indies molasses a 19th-century household was likely to have had. Some cooks find sorghum syrup a closer match in flavour than modern light molasses, though that is a matter of taste.
- One cup of butterEight ounces, 225 g, two American sticks. Butter of the period was often salted, so use salted butter or add about half a teaspoon of salt, which the recipe otherwise omits entirely.
- "Soda"Sodium bicarbonate, plain baking soda. A single teaspoon is modest for this much molasses; it is doing flavour and browning work as much as lift, and these are meant to be flat and crisp.
- "Flour enough"Expect roughly 5 to 6 cups (about 625-750 g) of all-purpose flour, perhaps more, worked in when the syrup is barely warm. Add the last cup by feel: the dough should be firm enough to roll without sticking but will stiffen further as it cools. If it goes hard before you finish, warm it briefly.
- RollingFor an actual snap, roll thin — an eighth of an inch or less. Anything thicker bakes into a soft molasses cookie, which is a fine thing but not what is being described.
- The missing ovenBake at 350-375F. Thin cakes take 7 to 10 minutes; they will still look slightly soft at the centre when done and crisp as they cool. They scorch quickly because of the sugar in the molasses, so watch the last two minutes.
- YieldAround six to eight dozen small cakes from the full quantity, depending on cutter size. The dough keeps well wrapped and chilled for several days, and rolls better after a rest.
Ginger snaps belong to the long family of hard, keeping spice cakes that predate chemical leavening entirely — gingerbread and honey cakes were baked stiff so they would last weeks in a tin. What marks this version is the soda, boiled straight into hot molasses rather than dissolved in milk or sour cream. Molasses was the cheap sweetener in North American households well into the 1880s, a byproduct of the sugar trade that cost a fraction of refined sugar, and recipes like this one use it as the entire sugar content. The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877) was compiled from contributions by named local women — the attribution to Mrs Upham is the point of the format — and was among the first Canadian community fundraising cookbooks, sold to support the Hospital for Sick Children. The brevity is characteristic: contributors were writing for other women who already knew what a stiff dough felt like and how hot their own stove ran.