Home › The Principles of Cookery › Gingerbread, Fanny's
Gingerbread, Fanny's
Put a quarter of a pound of butter into a bowl with half a pound of treacle, and place the jar near the fire till the butter is melted. Mix well, adding one table-spoonful of oatmeal, half an ounce of sifted ginger, the rind of a lemon, cut into thin slices, and as much flour as will make a stiff firm batter. Pour into a well-buttered mould, and bake in a good oven. Time, from thirty to forty minutes. Probable cost, 8d. Sufficient for a pint mould.
A plain Victorian steamed-textured gingerbread baked in a mould rather than a tin, with no raising agent at all. The two things to settle before starting are what treacle means and how much flour "as much as will make a stiff firm batter" actually is.
- TreacleBritish black treacle, or its closest equivalent, unsulphured molasses. Half a pound is about 2/3 cup by volume. Golden syrup will give a much paler, milder cake and is probably not what is meant here.
- Flour, unmeasuredThe original leaves this to judgement. For 4 oz butter and 8 oz treacle, expect somewhere around 8 to 10 oz (about 2 cups) of plain flour to reach a batter that holds its shape on the spoon. Add it in stages and stop when it stiffens; too much gives a dry, bricky crumb.
- No leaveningThere is no soda, no baking powder, no egg. The result is dense and close-grained by design, more like a treacle loaf than a modern cake. Adding half a teaspoon of bicarbonate would lighten it, but that is a different recipe.
- Ginger, half an ounceRoughly 2 to 3 tablespoons of ground ginger, which is aggressive by modern standards. With fresh supermarket ginger, 1 to 2 teaspoons per pound of flour is nearer the mark unless you want real heat.
- Lemon rind"Cut into thin slices" means thin pared strips of zest. Finely grated zest distributes better and avoids chewy ribbons in the finished crumb; take no white pith either way.
- Melting the butterThe bowl "near the fire" is gentle, indirect warmth: a low burner or a water bath, just until the butter goes liquid. Do not let the treacle mixture get hot enough to cook the flour when it goes in.
- A good ovenRead this as a moderate to moderately hot oven, 350 to 375F (175 to 190C). Treacle scorches readily, so keep to the lower end and cover loosely with foil if the top darkens before the centre sets.
- The mould and the yieldA pint mould is about 20 fl oz (roughly 2 1/2 US cups) in capacity, so this is a small cake serving perhaps four. In a larger tin the batter will be shallow and bake faster than the stated 30 to 40 minutes; test with a skewer at 25.
- KeepingTreacle cakes are generally reckoned to improve after a day or two wrapped closely. Freshly baked, this one may taste harsh with ginger; wrapped and rested it mellows.
Gingerbread in the nineteenth-century English sense took several forms, and the cheapness of treacle, a byproduct of sugar refining, made it a staple sweetener in working and middle-class kitchens long before refined sugar was affordable for everyday baking. Cassell's prints a number of gingerbreads side by side and distinguishes them by name rather than method; what lies behind "Fanny's" is not recoverable from the page. The spoonful of oatmeal is the telling detail, a small economy that also gives the crumb a faint grain, and the "probable cost, 8d" reflects the book's habit of costing every dish for readers running a household to a fixed weekly budget.