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Cocoa-Nut Gingerbread
Put one pound of golden syrup, a quarter of a pound of butter, and a quarter of a pound of moist sugar into a saucepan. Let them heat very slowly until the butter is quite melted, when it must be well mixed with the syrup, and the mixture poured into a bowl containing half a pound of ground rice, half a pound of the best flour, one ounce of ground ginger, a pinch of salt, a dessert-spoonful of baking-powder, the rind of half a lemon cut into small pieces, and one ounce of chopped candied lemon. Mix thoroughly, put the paste on one side, and, when it is quite cold, stir into it the white part of a large cocoa-nut finely grated. When it is well beaten, drop the paste upon a well-buttered tin in small cakes, and bake these in a moderate oven. Time to bake, about half an hour. Probable cost, 1s. 3d. per pound. Sufficient, eighteen or twenty cakes for a dessert-dish.
A melted-syrup gingerbread in the old style, stiffened with ground rice and enriched with fresh coconut. Nothing here is difficult, but several of the ingredients are named in Victorian terms.
- Let the paste go coldThe instruction to set the mixture aside until quite cold before adding the coconut is the hinge. Warm syrup dough is slack and will spread into one sheet on the tin; cold, it drops in neat mounds that hold their shape.
- Golden syrupAn inverted cane sugar syrup, still sold under the same name and widely available. Light corn syrup is the nearest substitute but is blander; a spoonful of molasses in with it gets closer to the original flavour.
- Moist sugarUnrefined or partly refined sugar with the molasses still in it, roughly what is now sold as light brown or soft brown sugar. Do not use white granulated, which will leave the cakes pale and dry.
- Ground riceGround rice, sold as a coarser grind than modern fine rice flour; rice flour is the usual stand-in. Not rice pudding grain. It gives the short, slightly sandy crumb that distinguishes these from an ordinary gingerbread; cornflour is not a substitute, and all-purpose flour throughout will make them tougher.
- A dessert-spoonfulTwo level teaspoons, midway between a teaspoon and a tablespoon in British usage. Do not increase it.
- The coconutThe white part of a large coconut, finely grated, will give somewhere around half a pound of fresh flesh, possibly more. Unsweetened desiccated coconut works if you soak it briefly in a few spoonfuls of warm milk first, since dried coconut will otherwise pull moisture out of the paste.
- An ounce of ground gingerThat is roughly five tablespoons, an assertive quantity by current standards. Halving it gives a gingerbread closer to modern spicing.
- Moderate ovenConventionally taken as about 350F, 180C. Half an hour suits cakes of about a rounded tablespoon each; check at 20 minutes, as they colour quickly once the syrup starts to caramelise and are still soft when they should come out.
- YieldEighteen to twenty cakes, as stated. They firm up considerably on cooling and keep for a week or more in a tin, improving after a day.
Gingerbread of this kind, melted rather than creamed, is the older English form: syrup, spice and flour worked together over gentle heat, a technique that predates chemical raising agents and produced the hard fairing gingerbreads sold at markets. The coconut is the newer element. By the time Cassell's dictionary was compiled in the late nineteenth century, imported coconuts were cheap enough in British towns to be within reach of ordinary households, and cookery writers used them freely in cakes, puddings and sweets. The candied lemon peel and the note of probable cost per pound both point to the book's audience: households keeping an eye on the grocer's bill, making a dessert-dish of small cakes rather than a single expensive confection.