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Ginger Snaps
2 cupfuls molasses. 1 cupful brown sugar. 2 teaspoonfuls powdered ginger 1 teaspoonful powdered mace 1 teaspoonful salt 2 teaspoonfuls baking soda 2 tablespoonfuls boiling water Flour 1 cupful Crisco Cream Crisco and sugar together, add molasses, spices, salt, soda mixed with boiling water and sufficient flour to make stiff paste. Roll out thin, cut with small cutter, lay on Criscoed tins and bake in hot oven from five to seven minutes.
Sufficient for one hundred snaps.
A promotional-cookbook recipe with a garbled ingredient list — the printed list omits the sugar and molasses that the method calls for, and gives flour without a quantity. Read it as a proportion sketch rather than a formula.
- Missing quantitiesThe method creams Crisco with sugar and adds molasses, but neither appears in the list with an amount. Something in the region of a cupful each of sugar and molasses would suit a batch built on 1 cupful of fat, but the original simply does not say, and period ginger snaps vary widely in how much of each they use.
- "Sufficient flour"Expect somewhere near 4 to 5 cups to reach a stiff paste, depending on how much molasses goes in. Add it in stages and stop when the dough holds a rolled sheet without sticking; over-flouring gives a dry, pale snap rather than a crisp one.
- Hot oven400 to 425F. At that heat five to seven minutes is accurate for thin cookies — they will still look slightly soft when you pull them and crisp as they cool.
- CriscoStill sold and essentially interchangeable here with any solid vegetable shortening. The modern product has been reformulated (it is no longer based on hydrogenated cottonseed oil) and may handle a little differently; chill the dough if it resists rolling.
- Baking soda in boiling waterDissolving the soda before it meets the acidic molasses helps distribute it evenly and avoids the bitter pockets dry soda can leave in a stiff dough. As the recipe directs, add it with the spices and salt, then work in the flour without dawdling.
- MaceThe dried outer covering of nutmeg, milder and more floral. Ground mace is still available in most spice aisles; nutmeg at about two-thirds the quantity is the nearest substitute.
- "Criscoed tins"Greased baking sheets. Parchment does the job better and stops the molasses edges from catching.
- YieldOne hundred snaps assumes a cutter around 1.5 inches and dough rolled genuinely thin, near 1/8 inch. A 2.5-inch cutter will give you a third of that count and a softer cookie.
The Story of Crisco was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, two years after Crisco went on sale as the first widely marketed hydrogenated vegetable shortening. The book's purpose was to teach American cooks that a manufactured fat could stand in for butter and lard in everything they already made, which is why familiar staples like ginger snaps appear with the brand name substituted into the ingredient list. Ginger snaps themselves long predate it — thin, hard, heavily spiced molasses biscuits were a fixture of British and American baking through the nineteenth century, prized because the sugar and spice kept them edible for weeks in a tin. The recipe's enormous yield of one hundred is a reminder that these were keeping cookies, baked in quantity rather than by the dozen.