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Gingerbread, German
Melt one pound of honey in a saucepan, and when it is quite hot, mix with it six ounces of moist sugar, an ounce of powdered cinnamon, two ounces of candied lemon, cut into thin slices, four ounces of sweet almonds, blanched and sliced, and sufficient flour to make it into a stiff paste. Roll the paste out two or three times, so as to have it quite smooth and stiff; make it into cakes of any shape or size, about a quarter of an inch in thickness, and bake on buttered tins in a moderate oven for half an hour or more. Probable cost, 1s. 8d. for this quantity.
This is Lebkuchen in its plainest form: honey, sugar, spice, nuts and enough flour to bind, with no eggs, no butter and no raising agent. The dough behaves quite unlike modern cookie dough, and a few things in the wording need pinning down.
- The hinge: flour by feel, not by number"Sufficient flour to make it into a stiff paste" is genuinely open-ended, but expect somewhere in the region of 1 1/2 to 2 lb against the pound of honey. Add it while the honey mixture is still hot and work to a dough that is firm enough to roll without sticking; too little and the cakes spread into puddles.
- A pound of honeyBy weight, not volume — roughly 1 1/3 cups. Warming it thins it enough to take the sugar and flour, but do not let it boil or it will darken and turn bitter.
- Moist sugarVictorian "moist sugar" is an unrefined or partly refined soft brown sugar. Light brown sugar is the closest current equivalent.
- Candied lemonThis means candied lemon peel, sold in strips or diced. Two ounces of the diced kind works; slice strips thin so they distribute through a stiff dough.
- A moderate ovenGenerally taken as somewhere in the region of 325-350F. The tins want buttering as directed, or use parchment, since the honey sugars catch quickly on bare metal.
- Half an hour is a long bakeQuarter-inch cakes at that heat are usually done in 15 to 20 minutes and will be firm at the edges. The longer bake in the original may reflect a cooler, less even oven as much as a taste for the hard, keeping sort of gingerbread; if that is not what you want, pull them earlier.
- They are meant to soften with ageHoney doughs of this kind bake hard and mellow over days in a tin. Storing them with a slice of apple or a piece of bread, replaced as it dries, is the traditional way to bring them round.
- No leavening at allThere is none here, and none is needed for a dense flat cake. Many German recipes of the period used potash or hartshorn; without them, expect no rise and a close crumb.
- YieldA pound of honey plus its flour makes a substantial quantity — on the flour estimate above, upwards of 3 lb of dough, or several dozen small cakes cut a quarter-inch thick.
"German gingerbread" in a nineteenth-century English cookbook almost always means Lebkuchen, the honey-and-spice baking associated with Nuremberg and other south German towns that sat on the medieval spice and honey trade. It is quite distinct from English gingerbread, which by this date leaned on treacle, butter and a chemical raising agent — note that this recipe contains no ginger at all, cinnamon carrying the spicing, which is characteristic of the older honey-cake tradition. Such cakes were baked stiff on purpose: they travelled, they kept for weeks or months, and they were sold at fairs and Christmas markets rather than eaten warm from the oven.