Home › Dainty Dishes › Ginger Snaps
Ginger Snaps
One cup each of butter, molasses and brown sugar, one. teaspoonful soda dissolved in a small half cup hot water, one teaspoonful ginger and cinnamon if you like.
A typical late-Victorian shorthand recipe: it lists the wet ingredients and the leavening and assumes the cook knows the rest. Two things are missing outright — the flour and the baking — so read the points below before starting.
- The flour is not givenThe original omits it entirely, as many books of the period did, expecting the cook to add flour until the dough was stiff enough to roll thin. With a cup each of butter, molasses and brown sugar plus a half cup of water, expect to need a large quantity — but the recipe as printed gives no figure, and any number here would be invention.
- Nor is the bakingNo temperature and no time appear. Ginger snaps of this type were baked hot and fast so the sugar sets crisp rather than chewy; thin molasses cookies scorch easily, so watch them closely.
- Soda in hot waterDissolving the soda in hot water before adding it is the working method of the recipe. It disperses the soda evenly and starts it reacting with the acid in the molasses, which is the only leavening here — there is no baking powder and no egg.
- Molasses, not blackstrapThe molasses intended is ordinary light or dark table molasses. Blackstrap is far more bitter and mineral and will dominate the ginger; sulphured molasses, still sold in some places, tastes harsh in a plain cookie like this.
- Butter quantityOne cup is two sticks, 8 oz. Nineteenth-century butter was often salted and sometimes quite heavily so; if using unsalted, a good pinch of salt in the flour brings the flavour back into balance.
- Snap means thinRoll it thin -- The crispness comes from rolling the dough very thin — an eighth of an inch or less — and baking until the edges darken. Rolled thick, the same dough makes a soft molasses cookie instead.
- SpicingA teaspoonful of ginger across a batch this large is restrained by modern taste. The cinnamon is offered as optional, and cloves or allspice would not be out of character for the period.
- YieldNone is stated. A batch built on three cups of butter, molasses and sugar is a large one — several dozen thin cookies — and the dough chills and keeps well if rolled in stages.
Ginger snaps belong to a long line of molasses-and-spice biscuits that reached American kitchens by way of English gingerbreads and Dutch and German honey cakes, and they became a staple of the domestic cookbook once cheap cane molasses and saleratus were widely available. Recipes like this one — no flour quantity, no oven, no time — are characteristic of community compilations, which were often assembled from contributions by local cooks writing down what they already knew by hand and eye rather than instructions for a stranger. The soda dissolved in hot water points to an older technique: before packaged baking powder was universal, cooks relied on the reaction between an alkali and the acid in molasses or sour milk, and dissolving the soda first helped avoid bitter yellow streaks in the finished cookie.