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GINGERBREAD (a la Soyer)
Mix half a pint of treacle and about one ounce of powdered ginger (more or less, according to taste) with one pound of flour. Stir well together, to form a stiff dough, roll it out thin, cut it into small rounds with a pastry-cutter, and bake, on a buttered tin, in a good oven for five or six minutes till crisp. A small lump of butter may be rubbed in if desired. Probable cost, 6d. per pound. Sufficient for two dozen cakes. Keep closely covered in a tin box. These cakes are good for assisting digestion.
A three-ingredient ginger snap with no leavening and no egg — the dough is stiff, the rounds are thin, and the whole thing lives or dies on how thin you roll it.
- Roll it genuinely thinWith no raising agent and no liquid but the treacle, thinness is what lets them crisp. Something around 1/8 inch suits the five or six minutes given; thicker rounds will tend to stay soft in that time.
- Half a pint of treacleAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, so about 1 1/4 US cups, roughly 14 oz by weight. Black treacle is the intended article; unsulphured molasses is the closest supermarket match, and golden syrup will give a paler, sweeter, less bitter biscuit.
- An ounce of ginger is a lotOne ounce of ground ginger is roughly 5 tablespoons to a pound of flour, ferociously hot by current taste. The recipe's own hedge, "more or less, according to taste," is worth taking up; 1 to 2 tablespoons gives a recognisable ginger snap.
- A good ovenGenerally read as a fairly brisk heat, somewhere around 400F. At that heat thin rounds are done in five or six minutes, and treacle scorches quickly, so watch the last minute rather than the clock.
- FlourPlain (all-purpose) flour. The recipe has no leavening at all: these are snaps, not cake gingerbread. Adding baking soda changes the biscuit into something else.
- The optional butter"a small lump" rubbed in, an ounce or so, shortens the dough and makes it easier to roll. Without it the biscuit is harder.
- Yield and keepingTwo dozen small rounds. The tin box is not sentiment: treacle biscuits pull moisture from the air and go leathery within a day if left out, so seal them airtight once fully cool.
- On "assisting digestion"A period commonplace rather than a claim to test. Ginger's reputation as a settler of the stomach is old and traditional; the sugar load here is considerable either way.
The attribution is to Alexis Soyer (1810-1858), the French-born chef of the Reform Club in London who became the best-known cook in Victorian Britain — he wrote for a mass audience, campaigned on feeding the poor, and reorganised army cooking in the Crimea. A recipe like this is characteristic of him: three cheap ingredients, no eggs, no butter unless you can spare it — the sort of thing his Shilling Cookery for the People offered households that bought treacle by the jar rather than sugar by the loaf. Cassell's compilers took his name as a selling point long after his death, and the dish sits in the older English tradition in which "gingerbread" meant a hard, dark, keepable biscuit sold at fairs, not the soft spiced loaf the word usually conjures now.