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Gingerbread, Honeycomb
Put four ounces of fresh butter into a jar, near the fire, with half a pound of treacle, and half a pound of moist sugar. Mix half a pound of flour with one table-spoonful of ground ginger, the finely-chopped rind and juice of half a large lemon, and one tea-spoonful of powdered cinnamon. When the butter is melted, mix it with the treacle, etc., into the flour, and beat all together for some minutes. Spread the mixture very thinly upon buttered baking-tins, and bake in a moderate oven. Watch it particularly, and as soon as the gingerbread is done enough, take it out, cut it into squares, and curl each square round the finger. Keep closely covered in a tin box. This gingerbread will keep three or four weeks, but is best when newly made. When it loses its crispness, it should be put into the oven for two or three minutes before being used. Time, ten minutes to bake. Probable cost, 10d. for this quantity.
This is a brandy-snap-style lace gingerbread rather than a cake: a very high ratio of sugar and treacle to flour, spread thin, and rolled while hot. Everything depends on the few seconds between the sheet leaving the oven and setting hard.
- The hinge: roll it warmThe squares can only be curled while still pliable, which is roughly 30-60 seconds out of the oven. Work in small batches, and if a piece hardens before you reach it, return the tray to the oven for 20-30 seconds to soften it again.
- TreacleThe dark syrup of the British sugar refinery is most likely what is meant; unsulphured molasses is the closest substitute, though blackstrap is too bitter. Golden syrup gives a paler, milder sheet that still curls.
- Moist sugarVictorian "moist sugar" is an unrefined soft brown sugar. Light or dark soft brown sugar works directly.
- Weights, not cupsHalf a pound of flour is about 225 g (roughly 1 3/4 cups); half a pound each of treacle and sugar is 225 g each; four ounces of butter is 115 g, one stick. Weighing matters here because the batter's spread depends on the sugar-to-flour ratio.
- The jar near the fireThat is simply a gentle warming vessel. A small saucepan over low heat, or a bowl in the microwave in short bursts, melts the butter with the treacle and sugar without letting the sugar catch.
- Oven and timeA moderate oven is usually rendered as about 350F (175C). Ten minutes suits a genuinely thin sheet, which colours and then burns quickly, so the instruction to watch it is not decorative.
- Spread very thinlyThin means translucent when baked. Use parchment rather than relying on butter alone, and leave generous space if you drop the batter in separate spoonfuls, as it flows considerably.
- Yield and storageThe number of curled pieces depends entirely on how large you cut the squares; the recipe gives no yield. An airtight tin is essential, as the recipe's 'keep closely covered in a tin box' implies; any humidity turns them leathery, and the two-or-three-minute revival in the oven that the recipe mentions does work.
Thin, crisp, rolled gingerbread of this kind belongs to the same family as the brandy snap, a form long associated with English fairs in the nineteenth century. The "honeycomb" in the name is usually taken to refer to the open, bubbled texture that the high proportion of treacle and sugar produces as the sheet spreads in the tin, rather than to any honey in the mixture, of which there is none here. Treacle, a by-product of sugar refining, was cheap and widely available in Britain by the time Cassell's was compiled, which is why so many of the period's gingerbreads lean on it rather than on honey, the older sweetener for spiced cakes across northern Europe. The costing of tenpence, given as a matter of course alongside the timing, is a reminder that Cassell's was written for households running to a budget.