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Gingerbread, Hunters'
Beat three ounces of butter to a cream; add one pound and a half of flour, three ounces of moist and one ounce of sifted sugar, one ounce of candied peel, cut into thin strips, two or three drops of essence of lemon, and mix in one pound of treacle, slightly warmed, to make a smooth, firm paste. Roll out on a floured pastry-board, cut it into strips, about three inches long and one broad, and bake on a buttered tin, in a slow oven. Store in a closely-covered tin box. Time to bake, half an hour. Probable cost, 1s.
A stiff, unleavened treacle dough baked slowly into hard keeping biscuits — closer to a ship's biscuit than to a soft gingerbread, and notably containing no ginger at all. The dough is deliberately dry, so work by weight if you can.
- Weigh, don't measureA pound and a half of flour is about 5 1/2 cups, but the ratio here is tight enough that volume scooping will throw it off. Butter 3 oz is 6 tablespoons; treacle 1 lb is roughly 1 1/3 cups.
- TreacleUnqualified "treacle" in this period almost always means the dark sort: dark and faintly bitter, though not as harsh as blackstrap. Unsulphured molasses is the nearest supermarket equivalent; golden syrup is not, and will give a pale, cloying result.
- Moist and sifted sugar"Moist sugar" is unrefined light brown sugar; "sifted sugar" is finely ground white, roughly today's caster or superfine sugar. The two together are only 4 oz against a pound of treacle, so the sweetness is almost all molasses.
- Essence of lemonVictorian essence of lemon was an oil-based extract and was generally stronger than modern bottled lemon extract, so two or three drops is probably in the region of 1/4 teaspoon of a modern extract, or the zest of half a lemon.
- A slow ovenThe book gives no temperature; a slow oven is usually taken as roughly 275-300F. The point is to dry the strips through rather than brown them; half an hour at that heat gives a biscuit that is firm when cool, not soft in the middle.
- Working the doughWarm the treacle only to loosen it — hot treacle will melt the butter and make a slack, greasy paste. If the dough will not come together, a spoonful more warmed treacle is safer than water, which makes it tough.
- Where the name comes fromThickness -- Nothing in the method is difficult; the hinge is thickness. The recipe gives length and width but no thickness; cut the strips thin and even, or the thin ones scorch while the thick ones stay damp and will not keep.
- Yield and keepingThe closely covered tin is not fussiness: treacle is hygroscopic, so these biscuits tend to soften over a week or two, and they keep well.
- No ginger, no leaveningDespite the name there is neither spice nor raising agent. If you want the flavour most people now expect from gingerbread, a teaspoon or two of ground ginger and a little mixed spice sit naturally in this dough without altering its texture.
"Gingerbread" in nineteenth-century British usage covered a whole family of treacle doughs, some soft and cakelike, others hard as tiles, and the spice was not always present — the word had drifted from its medieval sense of preserved ginger to mean simply the dark treacle sweetmeats sold at fairs and by street hawkers. Hunters' gingerbread belongs to the hard, portable end of that family: a pocket biscuit meant to be baked in quantity, tinned, and carried out in the cold, though the name's connection to hunting, and any explanation of the recipe's low proportion of butter to treacle, is a matter of conjecture. Treacle was the cheap sweetener of the period, a by-product of sugar refining and a fraction of the price of loaf sugar, and the recipe's stated cost of a shilling for about three pounds of baking reflects that.