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Gingerbread, Flemish
Warm one pound of treacle in a bowl before the fire, and stir into it six ounces of butter. When dissolved, beat in as much flour, with two table-spoonfuls of oatmeal and half an ounce of powdered ginger, as will form a stiff firm batter. Beat it till smooth, and add two ounces of candied lemon sliced as thin as possible. Butter some moulds, and bake in a quick oven for nearly an hour. Probable cost, 1s. 2d.
A dense, unleavened treacle gingerbread of the older sort, closer to a chewy honey-cake than to the soft soda gingerbreads that came later. Two things matter: the flour is measured by feel, and the oven must be gentler than the word "quick" suggests.
- TreacleBlack treacle, not golden syrup, and not the mild American light molasses. Blackstrap is too bitter; ordinary unsulphured dark molasses is the nearest supermarket match. One pound is about 1⅓ cups.
- Flour by feelThe recipe gives no flour weight because the stiffness of the treacle varies. Expect somewhere around 1 lb to 1¼ lb of plain flour for a batter that holds its shape on the spoon rather than pouring. Add it in stages and stop at stiff, not dry.
- OatmealTwo tablespoons of fine or medium oatmeal, not rolled oats and not steel-cut. It is there for texture, giving the crumb a slight sandiness; pinhead oats will stay hard.
- No raising agentThere is no saleratus, soda or egg here, so nothing will lift the cake. It is meant to be close-grained and chewy. Do not be tempted to add baking soda unless you want a different cake entirely.
- The oven"Quick" in Victorian usage is usually reckoned at roughly 400-425F, though such equivalents are approximate and assume a brick or range oven whose heat falls steadily through the bake. Treacle scorches early and hard, so a modern oven held that high for an hour risks a burnt crust over an underbaked centre; something in the region of 325-350F is a safer working equivalent for a cake of this depth.
- MouldsSmall buttered tins, earthenware moulds or a shallow square tin. Fill about two-thirds; the batter spreads a little but barely rises. A skewer will not come out perfectly clean from a treacle cake, so judge by a firm top and slight shrinkage from the sides.
- Candied lemonCandied lemon peel, sliced as thin as the recipe insists, because thick pieces sink and weep syrup. Two ounces is roughly a third of a cup.
- Yield and keepingNearer 2½ to 3 lb of batter once the flour is in, enough for a dozen small cakes or one 8-inch square. Wrapped in paper and left in a tin for two or three days it softens considerably and tastes better; freshly baked it is tough.
Gingerbreads built on treacle rather than honey are well documented in British cookery from the eighteenth century onward, in kitchens where cane refining had made dark syrup one of the cheapest sweeteners available. The cost is the point of the entry as much as the flavour. The "Flemish" label is doing loose duty here: the Low Countries had a long-established trade in spiced honey cakes, the ancestors of Dutch peperkoek and taai-taai, which were stiff, unleavened, pressed into carved wooden moulds and sold at fairs and on St Nicholas's day. This version keeps the shape of that tradition, adding the reliance on ginger alone rather than a mixed spice and substituting treacle for honey. Cakes of this kind have a notably tight crumb, and the flavour needs a few days to come round.