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Gingerbread, American
Mix well together a pound of sifted sugar, two ounces of ground ginger, half a nutmeg, and a little grated lemon-rind, three pounds and a half of flour, a pound of chopped raisins, and a pound of currants, an ounce of carbonate of soda, and two ounces of chopped candied peel. Warm a pound of treacle; stir into it three-quarters of a pound of butter, and six eggs. Beat the whole, until thoroughly mixed, with a cupful of milk. Pour it into a well-oiled dish, or shallow tin, and bake in a slow oven for two hours. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. per pound.
A very large Victorian fruited gingerbread — the batch weighs something over seven pounds before baking. Halve or quarter it unless you are feeding a crowd or planning to keep it.
- Slow ovenRead this as roughly 300-325F (150-160C); the book gives no temperature, so the equivalence is approximate. The recipe itself directs two hours. Test with a skewer at the centre.
- TreacleBritish treacle here means black treacle or a dark cooking molasses, not golden syrup and not sulphured blackstrap. Unsulphured dark molasses is the closest supermarket match; warming it, as directed, is what lets the butter and eggs blend in smoothly.
- Carbonate of sodaAn ounce is about six level teaspoons. That is a lot even for three and a half pounds of flour, and the only acid present is the treacle. If the finished cake tastes soapy or looks unpleasantly dark, cut the soda to about two-thirds next time, or swap a third of it for baking powder.
- Sifted sugarPlain white sugar put through a sieve: usually lump or loaf sugar crushed and sifted rather than icing sugar, though usage varied. Granulated or caster both work.
- The cupful of milkGenuinely imprecise. A Victorian breakfast cup is roughly half a pint (10 fl oz); an American cup is 8 fl oz. Start with 8 fl oz and add more only if the batter is too stiff to pour — it should drop heavily from the spoon.
- Currants and raisinsCurrants are the small dried Zante grapes, not fresh redcurrants. Toss both fruits and the chopped peel in a little of the weighed flour before mixing, or they will sink through a batter this loose.
- The tin"Well-oiled" is not enough for a two-hour bake with this much sugar and treacle. Line the tin with buttered parchment, and wrap the outside with a collar of brown paper or a double layer of foil to protect the edges.
- Yield and keepingA very large cake: the raw mixture alone comes to close on ten pounds. A 12 x 9 inch deep tin, or two loaf tins plus a small one. Like most treacle gingerbreads it improves after two or three days wrapped in paper and foil, when the crumb softens and the spice settles.
In nineteenth-century British cookery books "gingerbread" covered two quite different things: the hard, keepable slabs and moulded figures sold at fairs, and the soft, dark, cake-like sort raised with soda and treacle. The soft kind was widely associated with America, where molasses was cheap and abundant and where pearlash and later saleratus (both forerunners of the carbonate of soda called for here) came into domestic use early - hence the label "American" attached to recipes like this one, which in British books generally signals the soft type rather than pointing at any particular American source.