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Ginger Cakes
One quart Orleans molasses, pint lard or butter, pint buttermilk, two table-spoons soda, two table-spoons ginger, flour enough to make a stiff batter; pour the molasses and milk boiling hot into a large tin bread-pan in which have been placed the ginger and soda (the pan must be large enough to prevent running over); stir in all the flour possible, after which stir in the lard or butter; when cold, mold with flour and cut in cakes. Care must be taken to follow these directions implicitly or the cakes will not be good; remember to add the lard or butter last, and buttermilk, not sour milk, must be used; boil the molasses in a skillet, and after pouring it into the pan, put the buttermilk in the same skillet, boil and pour it over the molasses, ginger and soda. This excellent recipe was kept as a secret for a long time by a professional baker. - Mrs. R. M. Henderson.
A baker's-scale gingerbread that works by scalding, not creaming: boiling molasses and boiling buttermilk are poured over soda and ginger, and the flour goes in while the mass is still hot. The instructions are fussy for a reason, and the order of operations is the whole recipe.
- The hinge: fat goes in lastThe original insists on it: stir in all the flour the hot mass will take, then beat in the lard or butter. The likely reason is that fat added earlier coats the flour and gives a slacker, greasier dough that is harder to roll and cut; the recipe itself only warns that otherwise "the cakes will not be good."
- Use a very large vesselTwo tablespoons of soda meeting boiling molasses and boiling buttermilk erupts to several times its volume. A 6- to 8-quart bowl or pot is the minimum; the original's warning about running over is literal.
- Orleans molassesNew Orleans molasses was dark cane molasses, and the nearest modern equivalent is one of the full-flavour or robust cane molasses sold today. Blackstrap is a different, far more bitter product and is almost certainly not what is meant; sorghum syrup will also behave differently.
- Buttermilk, not sour milkThe distinction was real in 1877: sour milk was clabbered milk of unpredictable acidity, buttermilk the tangy liquid left from churning, and the recipe is emphatic about which it wants. Modern cultured buttermilk is the closest substitute; milk soured with vinegar is a different thing again and may not behave the same way here.
- Quantities and flourA quart of molasses, a pint (2 cups) of fat and a pint of buttermilk make a very large batch; the flour is unmeasured ("all the flour possible"), so expect to work in several pounds of it and to get a great many cakes. Halving or quartering the recipe is sensible for a home kitchen.
- "Stiff batter" then "mold with flour"The dough is soft and sticky while warm and firms as it cools; the original says to let it go completely cold, then mold with flour and cut in cakes. It gives no thickness or shape, so roll it fairly thin and cut as you like.
- No oven temperature is givenIn fact the recipe stops at cutting the cakes and says nothing about baking. A moderate oven, somewhere around 350-375F, is a reasonable modern guess, and thin cuts will need only a few minutes; molasses doughs go from soft to hard quickly, so watch them and pull them early.
- Two tablespoons of gingerRoughly 12 g, a little under half an ounce for the full batch: assertive but not extreme against a quart of molasses. Ground ginger loses potency in the jar, so use a reasonably fresh tin if you want the heat the recipe intends.
Molasses gingerbread cut into small hard cakes was the common currency of nineteenth-century American baking: cheap sweetening, long keeping, and no eggs, which mattered in a household whose hens stopped laying in winter. New Orleans molasses reached Ohio kitchens up the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, and its acidity paired naturally with the soda that was increasingly taking the place of pearlash, though saleratus — itself a bicarbonate — remained in use well past the 1870s. Buckeye Cookery (1877) was assembled from contributed recipes credited by name, and the note that this one "was kept as a secret for a long time by a professional baker" is a familiar boast in such books — a claim to commercial-grade results, and a hint at how these community collections circulated trade knowledge into domestic use. The scalding method looks like what a baker working in bulk would do, and it may be part of why the dough can be rolled and cut like a biscuit rather than spooned out.