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GINGERBREAD LEEK (excellent)
Mix thoroughly, one ounce and a half of ginger in one pound and a half of flour; add one pound and a quarter of sugar, and two ounces of candied peel, cut very fine. Melt together half a pound of butter, and a quarter of a pound of the best treacle. Stir these into the flour, etc., flavour with three drops of essence of lemon, or more, if liked, and make the mixture into a smooth, firm paste, with three eggs, well beaten. Roll out on a floured board, and cut the paste into fingers. Bake in a good oven for ten minutes. Store in a closely-covered tin box. Probable cost, 2s. for this quantity.
A stiff, rolled gingerbread cut into fingers rather than a soft cake batter — closer to a hard ginger biscuit than to modern sticky gingerbread. The weights are generous; scale by half unless you want several dozen.
- The hinge: a firm paste, not a batterEverything depends on the dough being rolled stiff enough to cut cleanly. Add the beaten eggs a little at a time and stop as soon as it comes together; a slack dough will spread into one sheet in the oven and cannot be cut into fingers afterwards.
- "A good oven"The phrase is vague and the book gives no temperature; a brisk oven, somewhere around 400F (200C), is the usual modern reading. Watch the fingers rather than the clock: ten minutes or so sets them, a little longer takes them crisper. They will still feel soft when drawn out and harden as they cool.
- TreacleBlack treacle, not golden syrup and not blackstrap molasses. Unsulphured dark molasses is the closest supermarket match. Four ounces is about a third of a cup; weigh it rather than measure, and warm it with the butter as directed so it pours.
- The ginger is not a misprintAn ounce and a half of ground ginger to a pound and a half of flour is roughly eight level tablespoons, fierce by current taste. Ground ginger does lose pungency with keeping, so a fresh tin may bite harder than a long-stored one; how old the spice in any given Victorian pantry was cannot be known. Half the quantity is closer to modern expectations.
- SugarA pound and a quarter, with no kind specified; the moist light brown sugar common in the period is a plausible reading. Light or dark soft brown sugar gives a good colour and keeps the fingers from drying to dust.
- Essence of lemonA lemon flavouring stronger than the alcohol-based extract sold today; period essences were generally oil of lemon dissolved in spirit, and their strength varied. No reliable equivalent for three drops can be given, so use the finely grated zest of one lemon if in doubt.
- No raising agentThere is no soda or baking powder in the list, and the fingers come out dense and hard-edged rather than risen. Better not to add any.
- Yield and keepingThe ingredients come to rather more than four pounds of dough, so a large batch. The closely-covered tin is not an afterthought: stored, the fingers take up a little moisture and the raw heat of the ginger is said to mellow.
- "Probable cost, 2s."Two shillings for the whole batch, one of the running price notes Cassell's gave for household budgeting. It tells you the recipe was pitched at a middling kitchen, not a grand one.
Cassell's ran to thousands of entries and hoovered up regional and family names without always explaining them, which is why a title like "Gingerbread Leek" arrives with no gloss; the word has sometimes been guessed to be a survival of an older sense of a gingerbread cut in strips or lengths, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented and the compilers may simply have printed a name as they received it. The type, at any rate, is recognisable: a hard, rolled treacle gingerbread of the kind sold at fairs and kept in tins for weeks, close in character to the fairing and the parkin rather than to the steamed sticky loaf. Treacle, the dark by-product of sugar refining, was cheap in nineteenth-century Britain and did the double duty of sweetening and colouring, while ginger and candied peel were common pantry stores in a combination that appears in many Victorian cookery books.