1911's Ginger Snaps in Verse from a "Best Seller"

In the past decade, I've collected around 40 cookbooks — some are over 100 years old, others are newer. I‘m not religious. I’m not an avid cook. I can really only follow elementary recipes. My craft and attention wander after too many steps. Nevertheless, I've been fascinated by old church cookbooks and similar communal cookbooks.

Since the late 1800s, various religious and civic organizations have been publishing local cookbooks to raise funds and preserve their history and culture through food. I love the brevity of the old recipes, and how they cut steps that would have been obvious to contemporary readers. Imagining the incredible logistics involved in collecting, curating, printing and selling hundreds of recipes is almost as compelling as the recipes themselves.

Occasionally when I share about my niche obsession, someone will ask if I have any favorite recipes. The answer is always the same: a recipe from the 1911 Inglenook Cookbook, contributed by Sister Alice Funderburg of Gillford, Missouri.

There are a few reasons I’m drawn to this recipe. First, it’s written entirely in verse. Instead of listing ingredients and quantities, recipes from over 100 years ago were usually written in a concise narrative format, as if you were casually telling the recipe to a friend or neighbor. But recipes in verse weren’t uncommon, for example this Pumpkin Pie recipe from a 1889 issue of Good Housekeeping.

Second, gingersnaps hold a special place in my internal cookie jar. I love the spicy flavor, and I love how they hold up to dunks in tea or coffee. I also have fond memories of my grandmother making ginger snaps. I remember her rolling out the dough into logs, wrapping them neatly in wax paper, and then chilling them in the fridge for a few hours before slicing. And I’ll never forget her teaching me to grease a baking sheet with an empty butter wrapper. Waste nothing!

Finally, Sister Alice Funderberg is just a badass name. It makes me think of both the unstoppable ‘90s Ohio State Power Forward Lawrence Funderberk, and my favorite aunt, named “Sarah Alice.” Surely someone with such a strong name crafts a powerful ginger snap.

Patriarchal conventions of the time meant that most recipes in old church cookbooks, even until the 1990s, are credited to "Mrs. Husband's Name." Even in a rare female-dominated space, identity is erased. I can’t imagine. The Inglenook Cookbook is an exception for its time. The overwhelming majority of recipes are attributed to women under their own name. All authors are also given the “Sister” title, as was the norm for the Cookbook’s publisher, the Church of the Brethren, a pacifist Anabaptist denomination.

I didn't know when I bought it on eBay years ago, but the 1911 Inglenook Cook Book was not published by a local church like most books of the time. It was actually produced by the Church of the Brethren’s publishing arm. From 1900 to 1913, the Church published the weekly Inglenook Magazine. The Brethren Press, which still exists today, published a 1901 Inglenook Cookbook and the revised 1911 edition. These two editions contain 1,000 recipes from the Midwest and Northeast US. Fueled by the loyal readership of the weekly magazine, the two editions sold over 100,000 copies in total, making them a bestseller then and now.

In 1903, The Brethern Press also published the Inglenook Doctor Book: a collection of extremely questionable home remedies that were crowdsourced in much the same way recipes were in the Inglenook Cook Book. In fact, it was very common for cookbooks of the time to include a section in the back for crowdsourced home remedies. The Inglenook Cook Book was no exception with 12 pages of remedies for everything from a sore throat, to consumption, to rusty nail wounds, and various animal bites.

Judging by this sample, the remedies in the Doctor Book have not stood the test of time as well as the culinary recipes.The 1911 edition of the Cook Book was also reprinted as a mass market paperback in the 1970s. Likely making it one of the most read communal cookbooks from the early 20th Century. Seems like a perfect place to start my culinary expedition into meals of yore. Plus, if anything causes stomach pains, a remedy in the back of the book claims that I just need to mix a teaspoon of tar together with 3 egg yolks and drink this 3 times per day to be cured.

From the Inglenook Cookbook, 1911

Ginger Snaps. - Of all the cakes one loves to eat perhaps none charms the palate like good ginger snaps. And if to make the best you'd wish to know, 
Why, study well the lines you find below: 
Melt of butter half a pound; also of lard; 
Then add sugar brown a half a pound. 
Stir in a quart of lasses, not too hard, 
Four tablespoons of ginger nicely ground. 
Into this mixture sift two quarts of flour, 
Then, to insure the cake shall not be sour, 
Dissolve in milk four teaspoonfuls of soda; 
(Saleratus is advised, but I like not the odor). 
Mix either with milk; it surely makes no matter, 
So that you pour the milk into the batter. 
Add more four and roll out thin the dough; 
Then cut in cakes, but this you surely know. 
Bake them well in an oven cooks call "slow”, 
And when they are baked they will not last long, I know.

-  Sister Alice Funderburg, of Gillford, Missouri

My first task was converting Sister Alice’s poetry into a modern recipe format. I had recently learned that a “slow” oven was ~325°F, but no clue what “bake them well” meant in terms of time. Plus, there also looked like a lot of measurement conversion to be done. As I mentioned, I have a short attention span, (no home remedy for that in old cookbooks). So I put my faith in the technology of our time, Generative AI. I used Notion AI, and prompted it to convert the recipe into a modern format using modern cooking quantities. Here is the exact output, which I religiously attempted to follow.

Ginger Snaps

Ingredients:
1 cup butter
1 cup lard
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 quart molasses
4 tablespoons ground ginger
8 cups flour
4 teaspoons baking soda
Milk

Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 325°F (165°C).
2. Melt 1/2 cup of butter and 1/2 cup of lard in a large mixing bowl.
3. Add 1/2 cup of brown sugar to the bowl and stir well.
4. Pour in 1 quart of molasses and stir until well combined.
5. Add 4 tablespoons of ground ginger and stir well.
6. Gradually sift in 8 cups of flour and mix until well combined.
7. Dissolve 4 teaspoons of baking soda in some milk and pour into the batter. Mix well.
8. Roll out the dough to 1/4 inch thickness.
9. Cut the dough into cookies and place them on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.
10. Bake the cookies in the oven at 325°F (165°C) for 15-18 minutes or until golden brown.
11. Remove the cookies from the oven and let them cool on a wire rack.
12. Enjoy your delicious homemade ginger snaps!

- Sister Alice Funderberg X Notion AI

I doubled checked the measurement conversions and eyeballed the cook time of 15-18 minutes. Everything looked solid, so I prepped the ingredients and got ready to cook.

Before starting, I wondered why the recipe called for both butter and lard. Most cookbooks from that time have multiple ginger snap recipes, almost all of which require equal amounts of butter and lard.

Why use two different fats? I discovered that there were several reasons for this. Butter was more flavorful and had a higher water content. However, it was also 3-4 times more expensive due to the limited availability of industrial butter making processes. Therefore, many recipes combined the flavorful qualities of butter with the more affordable and smoother texture of lard by using equal parts of each. Despite my early skepticism, the golden glow of the melted butter and lard looked promising.

Adding the molasses and brown sugar and ginger was straightforward. I mixed everything by hand to keep it authentic to the time period, but mostly because I don't have a stand mixer and I can't find any of the attachments for the hand mixer. Sister Alice suggested using "Saleratus," but she preferred Soda because it doesn't have an odor. Sister Alice is correct that “it makes no matter” which you use since they are are essentially the same thing. However, to be precise, Saleratus is bicarbonate of potash, and Baking Soda is bicarbonate of Soda. PioneerGirl.com has a detailed breakdown of the history and differences between Baking Soda and Saleratus.

It took some time to sift in the 2 quarts or 8 cups of flour, but I eventually got it all mixed in my largest bowl. At this point, I should have realized that this batch of cookies was going to be more than just a few dozen, but that didn’t dawn on me until later. According to the NotionAI translated recipe the next step was to roll out the dough. Even my untrained eye realized that the dough was far too wet and sticky to roll out. Something was awry.

I reviewed the original recipe and noticed the vague instruction "Add more flour and roll out thin the dough." To make the dough workable, I gradually added more flour until it reached the right consistency. It ended up requiring an additional 2 cups of flour! This difference in quantity seemed significant, possibly due to a measurement error on my part or variations in the molasses compared to the 1911 version. Or maybe by “add more flour” Sister Alice meant a significant amount. Despite this hiccup, I was generally satisfied with the NotionAI conversion and remained hopeful that the cookies would turn out well.

Here’s where my grandmother’s teachings came in handy. Instead of rolling out and cutting cookies immediately, I shaped the wet and sticky dough into logs. I wrapped the logs in wax paper and foil, then refrigerated them for two hours. If my childhood memories proved true, this step would make it easier to slice the dough into cookies. After chilling in the fridge the logs were firm enough to easily slice. I could have easily cut them thiner than ¼ inch, but I was starting to realize I should have halved or quartered the recipe.

I've never been good at judging measurements. Once, I ordered a coffee table that turned out to be at least a foot too high. I also ordered large framed pictures of myself and my wife, as well as my sister and brother-in-law, without realizing they were poster size. So, it wasn't until I started placing the cookies on the baking sheets that I realized I had made way too many cookies. Sister Alice's recipe makes about 250 cookies, but I could only fit about 60 in the oven at a time.

I ended up freezing half of the dough, which should be good for at least 3 months. In addition to mentally adding up all the ingredients, many of the recipes in the Inglenook Cook Book should have been a sign that the quantities might be beyond family size. Just as one example, there were several recipes for 10-20 gallons of Apple Butter.

Even though NotionAI instructed to cook until the inky brown when raw cookies were “golden brown,” the baking time estimate was perfect. After about 15 minutes, the cookies smelled amazing and looked ready to come out.

I let them cool as instructed and removed them from the baking sheets. This would have been much easier, had I used parchment paper as instructed instead of foil. Not sure why I used foil, but it ended up fine. The baked cookies looked wonderful. Much darker than most ginger snaps I’m familiar with put the crispiness felt right.

As for the taste, the snaps were certainly molasses-forward. The ginger almost got lost under the molasses flavor. Next time I make them, I’d go for an even stronger cookie and add way more ginger. They’re thick and hearty. I think they’re best with coffee, tea, or milk. If you really like ginger snaps and want something a bit different, you’ll probably like them. But in the grand spectrum of cookies, I wouldn’t consider them a crowdpleaser. In fact one younger reviewer assumed they were chocolate from the color, and described the surprising taste as "“like coffee and fish.”

Even though there many university and other archives with large and wonderful collections of digitized old cookbooks, there’s something special about the old books as physical objects. Often one or more of the previous owners have added notes for variations, or circled recipes they especially liked. Often there are handwritten recipes on notecards, or newspaper clippings of recipes. In my copy of the 1911 Inglenook Cook Book I found this sweet handwritten note, saying “Loretta would like to have this cook book” and signed “Mother".

Mother’s wishes were apparently followed since there’s a handwritten inscription on one of the title pages saying “This book was given to me after my Mother (Maggie R Brubaker) Died October 22, 1984. Signed Loretta B Miller”.

I’m not 100% certain, but from my research, I believe that Loretta passed away in January 2021. I bought this book from an eBay seller in 2018, so I don’t know the story of how it found it’s way from Loretta to me, but I promise to take good care of it until it’s my turn to start writing notes like “Mother’s”. I hope Sister Alice and Maggie and Loretta are happy that this 112 year old recipe conjured up at least one more extremely large batch of ginger snaps. Thank you to all three.

I appreciate you subscribing and reading this first issue. I’ve been wanting to cook some recipes from these old books for a while. Having you all read this newsletter gives me the the extra push to make this dream happen.

If you have any feedback, questions, cooking tips, or stories about old communal cook books, I’d love to read them. If you have any requests for particular dishes or regions, please let me know. I’ll do my best to make it happen.

I’ve already picked out a recipe for the next issue that I’ll send out in two weeks. The cookbook I’ll be using has some of my favorite local ads. I’ll be attempting a 118 year old recipe for “Eggless Milkless Butterless Cake”. The author says, “The only way this cake can be kept is to hide it”.

- erik