Gingerbread
1/2 cupful sugar 1 egg 1/2 cupful molasses 1/2 cupful milk 1 1/3 cupfuls flour 1/4 cupful Crisco 1 teaspoonful salt 2 teaspoonfuls powdered ginger 1 teaspoonful powdered cinnamon 1/2 teaspoonful powdered cloves 1/2 teaspoonful baking soda or 2 teaspoonfuls baking powder
Sauce (Teaspoonful Crisco cupful lb)
1 teaspoonful Crisco 1 cupful (1/2 lb.) maple sugar 1 tablespoonful flour 1 egg 1 cupful boiling water For cake. Cream Crisco and sugar together, add egg well beaten, molasses, milk, soda, flour, salt, and spices. Mix and turn into Criscoed tin and bake in moderate oven forty minutes.
For sauce. Dissolve maple sugar in boiling water. Rub together Crisco and flour. Add gradually boiling syrup; and lastly the beaten egg. Then return to fire and stir briskly until thickened.
Sufficient for one small gingerbread.
This is an ingredient list with no method, which was normal in a book aimed at cooks who already knew how a gingerbread went together. The proportions are sound; what follows fills in the gaps.
- Method, since none is givenCream the Crisco with the sugar, beat in the egg, then the molasses and milk, then the dry ingredients sifted together. The batter will be loose and pourable rather than stiff.
- OvenBake at 350F. A gingerbread this size takes 25-30 minutes in an 8-inch square pan, or about 20 minutes in a shallower dish; test with a skewer at the centre.
- CriscoStill sold and still works here, though it was reformulated in the mid-2000s to cut trans fat and is not identical to the 1915 product. Any solid shortening can stand in measure for measure; butter will give more flavour and, because of its water content, a slightly different crumb.
- Soda or baking powderThe choice is not arbitrary. Soda reacts with the acid in the molasses and gives a darker, more open crumb; baking powder gives a paler, finer one. Use one or the other, not both.
- MolassesUse unsulphured light or dark molasses. Blackstrap is far more bitter and mineral and will dominate the spices.
- SaltA full teaspoon against 1 1/3 cups of flour reads high to modern palates, particularly if you use salted butter in place of Crisco. Half a teaspoon is closer to current practice.
- YieldEnough for one 8-inch square pan, cutting into nine or twelve squares. It keeps better than most cakes; the crumb is moister on the second day.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and issued by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, which had gone on sale in 1911 as the first widely marketed all-vegetable shortening. That accounts for the quarter cupful of Crisco standing where an older American gingerbread would have said butter, lard or drippings, and for the book's habit of naming the brand inside the ingredient list rather than in a note. Gingerbread itself was long established by then: molasses-sweetened, soda-raised gingerbread was a fixture of nineteenth-century American home baking, and cheap to make because molasses cost less than sugar. The alternative of soda or baking powder in the last line is a small snapshot of a kitchen in transition, where chemical baking powders were common but the older soda-and-molasses reaction was still in use.