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Excellent Soft Ginger-Bread
One and a half cups Orleans molasses, half cup brown sugar, half cup butter, half cup sweet milk, tea-spoon soda, tea-spoon allspice, half tea-spoon ginger; mix all together thoroughly, add three cups sifted flour and bake in shallow pans. -Mrs. S. Watson.
A plain molasses gingerbread of the kind that turned up on weeknight tables rather than at parties. The original gives no oven temperature and no time, so those are the two things to settle before you start.
- Orleans molassesMolasses shipped from New Orleans, generally sold as the better, milder grade. Use ordinary unsulphured molasses; blackstrap, from the last boiling, will make the cake bitter and harsh.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh milk, named to distinguish it from the sour or buttermilk that appears constantly in these books. Whole milk is right here, and no substitution is needed.
- Oven and timeThe original gives neither. A moderate oven, about 350F, suits it; in a shallow pan the batter will sit around three-quarters of an inch deep and should take roughly 25 to 35 minutes, until the centre springs back and a tester comes out clean.
- Pan'Shallow pan' here means simply a wide, low-sided pan, such as a jelly-cake or dripping pan; something around 9x13 inches will take this quantity. Grease and flour it, or line with parchment; molasses batters stick badly.
- The soda is the leaveningThere is no egg and no baking powder. The single teaspoon of soda works against the acidity of the molasses, so get the batter into the pan and the oven promptly rather than letting it stand.
- ButterHalf a cup is one stick. Soften it, or melt and cool it slightly, so it blends into the molasses; cold butter will stay in lumps in a batter mixed this casually.
- SpicingAs written the allspice outweighs the ginger two to one, which reads oddly to a modern palate. It is not an error, but a teaspoon of ginger rather than half will taste more like what most people now expect from gingerbread.
- Flour measure'Three cups sifted flour' is usually taken to mean sifted before measuring, which comes to roughly 10 to 12 oz (300-340 g). Scooping unsifted flour from the bag will add an ounce or more and dry the cake out.
- YieldAbout 16 squares from a 9x13 pan. It keeps well wrapped for two or three days and is better on the second day, as molasses cakes usually are.
Soft gingerbread — as opposed to the hard, rolled, cut gingerbread that kept for weeks in a crock — was one of the standard American cake batters of the nineteenth century, cheap because molasses was cheap and convenient because it needed no eggs. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping was compiled in Ohio by Estelle Woods Wilcox and published in 1877, growing out of the Centennial Buckeye Cook Book of 1876; it carries a number of soft gingerbread receipts among its cakes. The specification of Orleans molasses reads as a quality note: nineteenth-century American cooks distinguished between the lighter, sweeter molasses shipped out of New Orleans and darker, sharper grades, and recipes wanting a mild cake often said so. The attribution to Mrs. S. Watson is typical of the book, which gathered its contents from named contributors rather than from a single professional author.