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Ginger-Bread (One gallon molasses)
One gallon molasses or strained honey, one and a quarter pounds butter, quarter pound soda stirred in a half tea-cup sweet milk, teaspoon alum dissolved in just enough water to cover it, flour to make it stiff enough to roll out; put the molasses in a very large dish, add the soda and butter melted, then all the other ingredients; mix in the evening and set in a warm place to rise over night; in the morning knead it a long time like bread, roll into squares half an inch thick, and bake in bread-pans in an oven heated about right for bread. To make it glossy, rub over the top just before putting it into the oven the following: One well-beaten egg, the same amount or a little more sweet cream, stirring cream and egg well together. This ginger-bread will keep an unlimited time. The recipe is complete without ginger, but two table-spoons may be used if preferred. --Over fifty years old, and formerly used for general muster days.
This is a militia-muster batch — a gallon of molasses will give you something like fifteen pounds of dough. Everything below assumes you will divide it down before you start.
- Scale it firstA gallon of molasses weighs roughly 12 pounds and measures 16 cups; with the butter and the flour called for below you are looking at a dough of well over twenty pounds, enough for several dozen squares. An eighth of the recipe — 2 cups molasses, 2.5 oz butter, 1 tablespoon soda, a pinch of alum — is a manageable household batch.
- That much soda is not a misprintA quarter pound of baking soda is about half a cup, which works out to roughly a rounded teaspoon and a half per cup of molasses — well beyond what the acidity of molasses alone would neutralise, which may be why the alum is there too. The soda is what gives this kind of gingerbread its dark, open, slightly bitter crumb. Measure it by weight rather than eyeballing, since excess soda tastes soapy.
- AlumPotassium alum, sold as a pickling agent, is acidic in solution and was probably acting here as an acid to help the soda work. A teaspoon in a batch this size is a trace amount. It can simply be left out, or replaced with a like amount of cream of tartar.
- Tea-cupA nineteenth-century tea-cup is usually reckoned at somewhere between a half and three-quarters of a modern cup, but here it only needs to be enough liquid to slake the soda — a few tablespoons of milk per scaled-down batch is the point, not the exact volume.
- The overnight riseThere is no yeast in the list. The dough is set in a warm place overnight, and the slow, modest lift may come from fermentation of the molasses sugars as much as from the soda and alum; either way it is then kneaded "a long time like bread." Expect little more than a faint rise and possibly a slightly sour note rather than a doubling in bulk; a cool modern kitchen may give almost no rise at all.
- Oven"Heated about right for bread" gives no temperature; a workable modern equivalent is somewhere around 375-400F. At half an inch thick the squares bake quickly — check at 12 minutes and expect 15 to 20. They should be firm and dry at the edges; this is a keeping cake, not a soft cake.
- Flour, unspecified"Flour to make it stiff enough to roll out" is genuinely open. Add it gradually to a dough that holds a rolled sheet without slumping but is still tacky; for the full gallon batch this will be somewhere in the range of 12 to 14 pounds.
- The glazeOne egg beaten with an equal volume or slightly more of cream, brushed on just before baking, gives the gloss.
- Keeping"An unlimited time" is an overstatement, but the low fat, high sugar and dry bake mean these hold for weeks in a tin and stiffen rather than mould.
General muster day was the compulsory assembly of the local militia, a fixture of American town life from the early republic until compulsory muster decayed and was largely abandoned in the decades before the Civil War. Musters drew crowds, and crowds drew food sellers, so a stiff, dry, sweet gingerbread that could be baked in slabs and cut into squares suited a public gathering. New England had related muster- and election-day baking traditions, including election cake, though that is a yeast-raised fruit cake rather than a gingerbread. The contributor's note that the recipe was "over fifty years old" would place its origin in the 1820s or earlier, and by the time Buckeye Cookery collected it in the late 1870s the general muster was already a thing of the past. The gallon-of-molasses scale is the giveaway: this is not household baking but bulk baking for a public gathering, back when molasses was the cheapest sweetener on the shelf and honey the plausible substitute for anyone who kept bees.