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Sponge Gingerbread
Sift two teaspoonfuls of soda and a dessert-spoonful of ginger, in two cupfuls of molasses. Stir thoroughly, and add four well-beaten eggs, one cupful of butter, melted, one cupful of sour milk or buttermilk, in which is dissolved one teaspoonful of soda. Add flour until the whole is of the consistency of a pretty thick batter. Make into two loaves and bake.
A molasses gingerbread of the old proportional type: the flour is judged by feel rather than measured, and the leavening is split between the molasses and the sour milk. Expect roughly 4 to 5 cups of flour for a batter that mounds thickly on the spoon but still pours.
- A dessert-spoonfulBetween a teaspoon and a tablespoon in period usage, generally reckoned at 2 teaspoons. Two teaspoons of ground ginger in this quantity of batter is assertive but not excessive.
- The soda is deliberate, not a misprintTwo teaspoons go into the molasses and one more into the sour milk, three in total. Molasses is acidic and consumes soda on its own; the second addition works on the buttermilk. Sift the first two teaspoons into the molasses as the recipe directs; the third is dissolved in the milk, not sifted.
- Sour milkThis meant naturally soured raw milk. Cultured buttermilk is the direct substitute; failing that, add a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar to a cup of milk and let it stand ten minutes.
- Molasses, not blackstrapUse ordinary unsulphured molasses. Blackstrap is far more bitter and mineral than what a period kitchen would have poured from the jug, and two cupfuls of it will overwhelm the cake.
- Flour by consistencyAdd flour gradually until the batter is thick enough to hold a brief furrow from the spoon. Overshooting gives a dry, tough crumb; this cake is meant to be moist and slightly sticky.
- "Bake" means moderate"Bake" -- The recipe gives no oven heat at all. A moderate oven, around 350F, in two greased loaf pans of about 9 by 5 inches, for 40 to 50 minutes, suits it. A skewer should come out clean; molasses cakes look darker and done sooner than they are.
- Work quickly once combinedWith three teaspoons of soda against molasses and buttermilk, the reaction begins immediately. Get the batter into the pans and into the oven without delay.
- Yield and keepingTwo loaves, twelve or so slices each. Gingerbread of this kind improves on the second day once wrapped; the molasses keeps it moist for the better part of a week.
"Sponge" here likely refers to the light texture rather than to a true sponge cake, which uses no chemical leavening at all: four eggs and three teaspoons of soda were meant to lift a heavy molasses batter into something closer to cake than to the dense, keeping gingerbreads of earlier generations. Molasses was a cheap sweetener in nineteenth-century American baking, a byproduct of the sugar trade that cost considerably less than refined white sugar, and the pairing with soda was not merely a matter of leavening: the acidity of the syrup gave the soda something to react with. By the time this collection appeared, commercial baking powder was widely sold, but soda-and-sour-milk recipes persisted in household books.