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Whole Wheat Gingerbread
4 tablespoonfuls sugar 1/2 cupful Crisco 2 eggs 1 teaspoonful baking soda 1/4 cupful milk 2 cupfuls flour 2 cupfuls whole wheat flour 1/2 cupful seeded raisins 1/2 teaspoonful salt 1 1/2 cupfuls molasses 1/2 cupful chopped nut meats 1 teaspoonful powdered ginger 1/2 teaspoonful powdered mace 1 teaspoonful powdered cinnamon 3 tablespoonfuls chopped candied lemon peel Mix flours, then add peel, raisins, nuts, spices, and salt. Melt Crisco, molasses, and sugar, then cool, and add them with eggs well beaten, with soda mixed with milk. Mix well and turn into Criscoed and floured cake tin. Bake in moderate oven one hour.
Sufficient for one large cake of gingerbread.
A Crisco-era gingerbread, heavy on molasses and lightly leavened, meant to come out dense and keepable rather than light. A few points make it behave in a modern kitchen.
- Moderate oven"Moderate" in books of this period is usually read as somewhere around 350F/175C; the recipe itself gives no temperature. An hour at that heat suits a deep cake tin; check at 45 minutes if you use a shallower pan.
- CriscoAny solid vegetable shortening works, and the original Crisco of this book's period was a hydrogenated cottonseed product with a firmer, waxier set than today's. Butter gives a better flavour with molasses; use 1/2 cup melted and expect a slightly softer crumb.
- Melt, then coolThe shortening, molasses and sugar are warmed together only to combine them. Let the mixture come down to lukewarm before the beaten eggs go in, or they will curdle and set in threads.
- Leavening is light on purposeOne teaspoon of soda against 1 1/2 cups of molasses will not lift 4 cups of flour far. This is a close, moist, almost bread-like gingerbread. If you want it taller, an extra 1/2 teaspoon of soda is within reason, though the rise will still be modest.
- MolassesUse unsulphured dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and will dominate the spice. Grease the measuring cup first and it will pour out clean.
- The flourTwo cups white and two cups whole wheat, unsifted, is a stiff batter with only 1/4 cup of milk against the molasses. If it will not fall from the spoon, add milk a tablespoon at a time.
- Candied lemon peelThree tablespoons chopped, from a block or from good whole candied peel. Supermarket mixed peel is sweeter and less bitter; chop it finer so it disperses.
- Pan and yield"One large cake" is not defined; a tin of roughly 9x13 inches, or a 9-inch tube pan, will take this quantity. Expect something in the region of 16 to 20 squares, and it improves after a day wrapped in foil.
This comes from one of the Crisco recipe books issued by Procter & Gamble in the 1910s and 20s, when the company was working hard to persuade cooks that a vegetable shortening could replace lard and butter in everything they already made — the instruction to grease the tin with Crisco as well as bake with it may well belong to that effort. The gingerbread itself is much older than the shortening: a molasses-and-spice loaf of this kind was a fixture of American home baking through the nineteenth century, leavened with soda against the acid in the molasses. The whole wheat is the period detail. Graham and whole wheat flours were promoted heavily in the health-reform writing of the era, and cookbook authors folded them into familiar sweets to make them palatable, as here, where the whole wheat is cut with white flour. The dried fruit, nuts and candied peel push it toward the older English gingerbread tradition, closer to a fruited cake than to the plain hot squares served with whipped cream.