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Dessert

Ginger Snaps

A ginger-flavored cookie made with syrup, sugar, butter, lard, milk, baking soda, spices, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Ginger Snaps

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the dough

  1. In a large bowl, combine syrup, sugar, and butter.

  2. Add lard and milk, mixing well.

  3. Stir in baking soda, ginger, cloves, and cinnamon.

  4. Gradually add flour until a stiff dough forms.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll out the dough and cut into desired shapes.

  2. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) until golden.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Ginger + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,380 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Ginger + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Syrup + sugartop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Syrup
Adds sweetness and moisture, and helps the cookies brown and stay chewy.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and rich flavour.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic syrup to lift the dough and help it spread and brown.
Ground ginger
Provides the main warm, spicy aroma that defines the cookie.
Flour
Provides the structure that turns the mixture into a stiff dough that holds its shapes.

The step that matters

Gradually add flour until a stiff dough forms. Adding flour in small amounts lets you judge stiffness. Too much flour makes the cookies dry and dense, while too little leaves the dough too soft to cut and shape.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (syrup, sugar, butter, milk, ginger, cinnamon, flour):

  1. Cardamomfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Clovethe original
  4. Allspicefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against syrup, sugar, butter, milk, ginger, cinnamon, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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