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Gingerbread Fingers, American
Warm half a pound of best treacle. Stir into it a piece of butter the size of an egg, and four table-spoonfuls of sifted sugar. Take a little powdered allspice, a heaped tea-spoonful of ground ginger, the rind of a lemon chopped fine, and a pound of the best flour. Mix all the dry ingredients together, and stir the treacle and butter into them. Last of all, dissolve an ounce of carbonate of soda in a table-spoonful of warm cream, and put it with the rest. Work all well together for some time. Roll the mixture out to the thickness of half an inch. Divide it into "fingers," and put at once on well-oiled tins, in a moderate oven. Store the fingers in a dry place, not exposed to the air, and they will be the better for a month's keeping. Time to bake, an hour or more. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. per pound.
A stiff rolled gingerbread of the keeping sort, meant to be baked hard and mellowed for weeks in a tin. Two figures in the original need correcting before you go near the oven.
- The soda is the hingeAn ounce of carbonate of soda (roughly two tablespoons) to a pound of flour is many times what a modern baker would use, and will give a soapy, alkaline taste. One to two teaspoons of bicarbonate of soda is right for this quantity of treacle; the acidity of the treacle is what it reacts with.
- Baking time"An hour or more" for half-inch fingers would produce charcoal. Bake 12 to 18 minutes at 350F, until the surface is dry and springs back. They firm up considerably as they cool and are meant to be hard.
- Moderate oven350F. The oiled tins the recipe calls for are better replaced with baking parchment, since treacle doughs stick fiercely.
- TreacleHalf a pound is about two-thirds of a cup by volume. Use black treacle or unsulphured molasses, not golden syrup, which lacks the acidity the soda needs and the colour the recipe assumes.
- Butter the size of an eggTwo ounces, or four tablespoons. Warm the treacle only enough to melt the butter into it; boiling it will stiffen the dough.
- Sifted sugarIn nineteenth-century usage this means sugar broken from the loaf, pounded and passed through a sieve, giving a fine sugar; it is not modern confectioners' sugar, which contains added starch. Four tablespoons of ordinary caster or granulated sugar.
- Lemon rindChop or zest finely and rub it into the sugar first, which draws out more oil than mixing it loose with the flour.
- Yield and keepingAbout 24 fingers from this quantity. The instruction to keep them a month in a closed tin is sound for a hard, low-moisture biscuit; they soften and the ginger and allspice round out.
Cassell's marks these "American" chiefly by their form: hard, spiced, molasses-sweetened fingers baked to keep, of a type common in New England households where molasses from the West Indies trade was the everyday sweetener and refined sugar the luxury. British cooks knew the same thing as treacle gingerbread, and the two traditions are closely related. The reliance on carbonate of soda rather than yeast or barm suggests a date somewhere in the broad spread of chemical leaveners through domestic baking, which had begun by the 1830s and 1840s, and the note that they "will be the better for a month's keeping" belongs to an older logic still: gingerbread of this density was baked in quantity, stored in a tin or crock, and drawn on for weeks, its spice and treacle acting as both flavour and preservative.