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Cake Confectionery and Little Sweets: Ginger
GINGER CHIPS Stir together a cupful of butter and one cupful of brown sugar. Add one tablespoonful of ginger and one teaspoonful each of cloves and cinnamon. Mix in two cupfuls of good baking molasses and the grated peel of a large lemon. Add a teaspoonful of soda dissolved in a little hot water. Mix in enough flour to make a stiff paste. Roll out very thin, a small portion at a time, and cut into narrow strips about one inch wide and four inches long. Bake in a moderate oven for ten minutes.
GINGER WAFERS Stir one-fourth cupful of butter and one-half cupful of sugar to a cream, add two eggs, the whites and yolks beaten separately. Add a half cupful of flour or just enough to make a thin batter, mix well, then add one tablespoonful of ginger, and the grated peel of a lemon. Drop by spoonfuls on buttered tins, far enough apart not to run together. Bake in a moderate oven, and when half done roll up into little cylinders, and return to the oven and crisp until brown.
MARSHMALLOW CAKES Blanch and dry gently in the open oven sufficient hickory-nut meats to fill three-fourths of a cup. Cool and chop very finely. Beat three eggs, yolks and whites together, until light. Add the nuts, two tablespoonfuls of powdered sugar, a half teaspoonful of orange extract and sufficient flour to form a soft dough. Roll out on board until about an inch in thickness and cut in small diamonds that measure only two or three inches from point to point. Lay on shallow greased tins and bake to a pale brown in a moderate oven. Frost with marshmallow icing while they are still warm.
GINGER NUTS Take one pint of baking molasses and add one-half cupful of melted butter, one cupful of brown sugar and one tablespoonful of powdered ginger. Stir these ingredients well together, and while mixing add two tablespoonfuls of candied lemon or orange peel, one tablespoonful of candied angelica cut into small dice, and a teaspoonful of soda dissolved in a little warm water. Having mixed all thoroughly together break in one egg and work in as much flour to form a paste just stiff enough to handle. Form into balls, and press a raisin or blanched almond in the top of each, and bake on greased tins in a rather quick oven.
GERMAN GINGER BALLS Beat up four eggs until very light and foamy; then add gradually a half pound of light brown sugar, a teaspoonful of ginger, and one-half teaspoonful of allspice or cinnamon, the juice of one lemon and three-fourths cupful of pastry flour. Form with floured hands into small balls, placing in the center of each a tiny piece of preserved ginger, or candied ginger. Place in a greased baking-pan far enough apart not to touch when baked. Bake in a quick oven.
CINNAMON CRISPS Beat one-third cup of butter and two-thirds cup of sugar until light and creamy, then add one teaspoonful of ground cinnamon, one and one-half cups of flour and one teaspoonful of baking-powder together. Mix to a dough with one-third cup of milk, using only enough to make the dough so that it will roll out easily. Roll very thin, and cut into small squares or rounds. Bake on greased tins in a moderate oven.
CHOCOLATE STICKS Cream together one cupful of sugar, one tablespoonful of butter, the yolk of one egg and one-half cup of milk. Melt one and one-half squares of chocolate, add to the mixture, then add one cupful of flour, add one-half cupful more of milk, and one-fourth cupful of flour into which has been sifted one teaspoonful baking-powder and one-fourth teaspoonful of soda. Bake in a sheet that will be about three-fourths of an inch thick when baked. Cut into strips about one inch wide and three or four inches long. When cool dip into pink fondant, then into melted chocolate. Decorate the top of each strip with a half of a pecan or hickory-nut meat.
Seven small-baked-goods recipes from the confectionery side of the book, written for cooks who were assumed to know their own stove. The conversions below cover the oven language, the vanished ingredients, and two measurements that look wrong on the page.
- Oven temperaturesA "moderate oven" is roughly 350-375F and a "quick" or "rather quick" oven roughly 400-425F. The ginger nuts and German ginger balls are the two the recipes send to the hotter oven; the rest are all called moderate.
- Baking molassesThis means ordinary mild or full-flavour cane molasses, the everyday grocery grade of the period, not blackstrap. Blackstrap will make the ginger chips and ginger nuts bitter and darken them past the point where you can judge doneness.
- Soda in hot waterDissolving the soda before adding it is not decorative. In a stiff molasses dough there is no chance to distribute dry soda evenly, and undissolved pockets leave soapy yellow spots. Use the smallest amount of water that dissolves it.
- The marshmallow cakes' thickness"Roll out on board until about an inch in thickness" may well be a slip, since a soft egg-and-nut dough an inch thick, cut into the two- or three-inch diamonds the recipe specifies and baked only to a pale brown, would be hard to bake through. Rolling it out as a thin sheet is the safer reading.
- Hickory nutsHickory-nut kernels have only a thin papery skin and are not normally blanched, so read the instruction as the gentle drying the recipe itself describes ("dry gently in the open oven"). Pecans, a close relative, are the nearest widely available substitute.
- Candied angelicaThe candied stems of Angelica archangelica, a common confectioner's ingredient at the time and now sold mainly by specialist suppliers. Candied citron or extra candied peel fills the same role, though without the faintly resinous green note.
- Chocolate "squares"One square is one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, so the chocolate sticks take 1.5 oz. Modern bar chocolate at 70 percent will make the batter sweeter and softer than intended.
- Rolling the ginger wafersThe hinge of that recipe. As the text says, roll them when half done: lift each wafer and roll it around a spoon handle while it is still hot and pliable, then return it to the oven to crisp. Once cooled they shatter; if a tray stiffens, a few seconds back in the oven softens it.
- Fondant and dippingThe chocolate sticks assume you have fondant on hand. Tinted fondant must be warmed to barely body temperature to dip cleanly; hotter and it dulls, cooler and it ropes.
These are the sorts of small stiff cookies that sat on the boundary between the bakehouse and the candy kitchen, which may be why they appear in a book that also treats confectionery: cookies of this kind were often eaten as sweets rather than at the table. The ginger recipes descend from the long European gingerbread tradition, where molasses or honey, ginger, and an alkaline leavening produced a dough that kept for weeks; the "German ginger balls" are a recognisable cousin of the egg-and-sugar Lebkuchen family, in which beaten eggs rather than fat do the lifting. Hickory nuts in the marshmallow cakes mark the book as American and domestic, since hickory was a gathered nut in much of the eastern United States rather than a purchased one. Marshmallow icing at this date was typically made with gelatine and beaten egg white; the root of the marsh mallow plant that gave the confection its name is generally said to have fallen out of commercial use by this period.