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Almond Gingerbread
Melt half a pound of treacle with two table-spoonfuls of butter, and add to them two table-spoonfuls of flour and two of ground rice, a small cupful of sugar, a little chopped lemon-and candied-peel. When these ingredients are thoroughly mixed, put to them a quarter of a pound of almonds blanched and pounded. Beat well together for a few minutes, then bake in small cakes on a well-oiled tin. The oven must not be hot. Time to bake, forty minutes. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. per pound.
A stiff treacle batter with almost no flour in it — closer to a chewy florentine than to a loaf gingerbread. The low oven is the whole point, and the cakes spread.
- No ginger in itSome Victorian "gingerbread" recipes were treacle cakes with little or no spice, though most do call for ginger. If you want it to taste of ginger, a teaspoon or two of ground ginger belongs with the flour; the recipe as printed relies on treacle, lemon and peel for flavour.
- TreacleBlack treacle rather than golden syrup is the likely reading for a gingerbread. Unsulphured molasses is the closest widely available substitute; blackstrap is too bitter. Half a pound is roughly two-thirds of a cup by volume.
- Ground riceNot rice pudding grain but rice milled to a meal, coarser than modern rice flour, which is the nearest substitute. It gives the short, slightly sandy bite that white flour alone will not.
- The ovenThe book gives no temperatures; "must not be hot" points to a cool oven, somewhere around 300F in modern terms. Treacle scorches fast and these cakes have so little flour that a hotter oven risks blackening the edges before the centres set.
- AlmondsA quarter pound of blanched almonds pounded in a mortar gives a coarse, uneven grind — pulse whole blanched almonds in a processor rather than reaching for fine almond flour, which makes the cakes pasty.
- They spreadWith only four tablespoons of flour and ground rice against half a pound of treacle, small mounds are likely to spread a good deal. Space them well apart; parchment is safer than the "well-oiled tin" alone.
- Timing and donenessForty minutes is right for a genuinely cool oven, but start checking at twenty-five. They are done when the surface stops looking wet; they are soft coming out and crisp as they cool, so do not bake to firmness.
- YieldThe cost is quoted at 1s. 6d. per pound, and the almonds are the expensive part.
Cassell's belongs to the great late-Victorian run of household dictionaries, and this gingerbread entry shows how far the word had drifted from spice. Medieval gingerbread was ginger and honey worked into breadcrumbs; by the nineteenth century the defining ingredient was treacle, cheap and plentiful as a by-product of cane sugar refining, and the spice became optional. Ground rice appears constantly in books of this period as a way of lightening or shortening a batter without more wheat flour, and pounded almonds mark the recipe as a tea-table luxury rather than a nursery bake — Almond gingerbread of this kind sits closer to the continental biscuit tradition than to the sticky parkin of the north of England.