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Alum Ginger-Bread
Pint molasses, tea-cup melted lard, table-spoon ginger, table-spoon salt, tea-cup boiling water; in half the water dissolve table-spoon pulverized alum, and in the other half a heaping table-spoon soda; stir in just flour enough to knead, roll about half inch thick, cut in oblong cards, and bake in a tolerably quick oven. -Mrs. Wm. Patrick, Midland, Mich.
This is a hard molasses gingerbread of the rolled-and-cut sort, and the problem is not the technique but the leavening. The alum makes it unmakeable as written.
- The alum is the reasonA tablespoon of pulverized potassium alum (potassium aluminium sulphate) is on the order of 10-15 grams of the salt going into a single batch of dough. Food-grade alum today is used at about a quarter-teaspoon per quart of pickling brine, and even that is now generally discouraged; nothing in modern food practice puts grams of it into something eaten by the handful.
- What it was doing thereAlum is acidic in solution, and the recipe pairs it with a heaping tablespoon of soda so the two react and give lift. It is a homemade chemical leavening, the two dissolved separately in boiling water, presumably so the gas is not thrown off before the flour goes in. Substituting a modern acid does not rescue the rest of the proportions, which were written around that reaction.
- Soda in the same rangeA heaping tablespoon of soda is generous, though a batch built on a pint of molasses is a large one, and the molasses itself is acidic enough to take up some of it. Any soda left unreacted carries a soapy, metallic bitterness through the finished cake.
- AstringencyAlum is powerfully mouth-puckering; that is why it appears in styptic pencils. At this dose it would be tasted, not merely felt, and the ginger and molasses would not cover it.
- The salt is not a typo eitherA tablespoon of salt in a pint of molasses reads high to a modern palate but is within historical range for a keeping gingerbread. It is the alum, not the salt, that puts this recipe out of reach.
- If you want the cakeUse a current recipe for hard rolled gingerbread or ginger snaps. There are plenty that give the same dense, snappy card without a mineral astringent doing the leavening.
Alum turns up occasionally in nineteenth-century American baking because chemical leavening arrived in the kitchen before it arrived in a reliable box, though household recipes calling for it are unusual, and the alum controversy belongs mainly to commercial baking powders. Before commercial baking powders were cheap and consistent, cooks improvised their own acid-plus-alkali pairs: sour milk with saleratus, cream of tartar with soda, and in thrifty households alum, which was sold at every druggist and grocer for pickling, dyeing, and clarifying water. Alum-and-soda mixtures were also a notorious adulterant in commercial baking powders and in bakers' bread, and the food-purity press campaigned hard against them, a fight that ran on well past 1900. That this recipe travelled to Buckeye Cookery under a contributor's name from Midland, Michigan is typical of the book: it was assembled from readers' own household formulas, and it preserves what people were actually doing rather than what the reformers wished they would do.