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Gingerbread Pudding
One cupful molasses, one-third cup of melted butter, one-half cup boiling water, two small cups flour, one and one-half teaspoonfuls soda, dissolved in the boiling water, one teaspoon cinnamon, one teaspoon ginger, a little nutmeg and salt, bake about half an hour, eat with cold sauce.
A plain molasses gingerbread, eggless and leavened entirely by soda reacting with the molasses, meant to be cut warm and eaten with a cold butter sauce. It behaves like a batter cake rather than a pudding in the boiled sense.
- The hinge: soda in boiling waterThe soda is dissolved in the half cup of boiling water and that liquid goes straight into the molasses, which foams. Mix and get it into the pan without delay, since much of the lift is spent within a few minutes of the two meeting.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature or pan size is given. A moderate oven, around 350F, suits this batter; the recipe's half hour implies it was baked shallow, so use a shallow pan and check early.
- "Two small cups"A nineteenth-century "small cup" is not a standardised measure. Start with 1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour by the modern 8 oz cup; the batter should pour thickly, not drop in lumps.
- Molasses, not blackstrapUse unsulphured dark molasses. Blackstrap, the final boiling, is markedly more bitter and less acidic, so it does not react with soda the way this recipe assumes.
- Salt and nutmeg"A little" means about 1/4 teaspoon salt and 1/4 teaspoon grated nutmeg. Whole nutmeg grated fresh is closer to the intent than pre-ground.
- Cold sauceIn books of this period a cold sauce for a hot pudding usually means hard sauce: butter creamed with powdered sugar and flavoured with vanilla, brandy or lemon, chilled firm and spooned onto the hot pudding so it melts. A cold custard or sweetened cream also works.
- Doneness and yieldDark batters hide their colour cues; test with a skewer, which should come out clean but the crumb still moist. Serves six to nine, cut in squares and served warm.
Gingerbread in American household books of this period was rarely the crisp cut-out cookie; it was most often a soft molasses cake, and calling it a pudding arguably moved it from the tea table to the dessert course, where a hot sweet with a cold sauce may well have been a familiar way for a family meal to end. The absence of eggs is characteristic of economical baking: molasses supplies both the acid and much of the moisture, and soda alone does the lifting, a technique that spread rapidly once cheap saleratus and then baking soda became grocery staples in the mid-nineteenth century. Molasses remained the everyday sweetener in much of the country long after refined white sugar was affordable, in part, it seems, because it was cheaper by the gallon, which is why so many puddings, pies and cakes in books like this one taste of it.