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Gingerbread Nuts
It is well to make the paste for these nuts an hour or two before baking them, and put it in a cool place. Rub three ounces of butter into one pound of flour; add the finely-chopped rind and juice of half a lemon, and a dessert-spoonful of ground ginger. Put a table-spoonful of honey into a quarter of a pound of treacle. Let them melt over the fire for a few minutes, stirring them well together, then mix them into the other ingredients. Roll the paste on a floured board to the thickness of a quarter of an inch. Stamp it into small round cakes, and bake on tins in a good oven till crisp. Probable cost, 6d.
A stiff, unleavened ginger biscuit rather than anything cakey — the paste is essentially flour, butter, spice and syrup, and it depends on being rolled thin and baked until genuinely dry.
- TreacleUse dark cane molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and much less sweet. A quarter of a pound is about 1/3 cup by volume; weighing is more reliable with syrups.
- "A good oven"The book gives no temperature; for small thin biscuits read it as a moderate oven, somewhere around 350F. Too hot and the sugars in the treacle scorch before the centres dry out.
- TimingThe original gives none. At a quarter-inch thick and roughly 1 1/2 inches across, expect 10–14 minutes. They will still feel slightly soft when hot and crisp as they cool, so judge by colour and by the edges firming, not by snap.
- The rest mattersThe hour or two in a cool place is not optional padding. It lets the flour hydrate and the butter firm, which keeps the rolled paste from sticking and stops the nuts spreading into shapeless discs.
- No raising agentThere is no saleratus, soda or baking powder here, unlike many gingerbread recipes. The result is meant to be hard and keeping -- closer to a ginger snap than to a soft cookie. Adding soda changes the biscuit entirely.
- Melting the syrupWarm the honey and treacle only until fluid and combined; do not let them boil. Mix them into the dry ingredients while still warm so the paste comes together without extra liquid.
- Lemon"Finely-chopped rind" means what we would now grate or zest. Half a lemon's juice is roughly a tablespoon, which is all the moisture the paste gets besides the syrup.
- Yield and keepingA pound of flour makes a large batch, several dozen small nuts. Cool them completely and store airtight; baked dry like this they keep well.
- CostThe sixpence reflects ingredient prices at the time the book was compiled, and indicates only that these were cheap to make.
"Nut" here means a small hard round cake, not an ingredient. Gingerbread nuts of this kind were sold at markets and fairs in nineteenth-century Britain. Such biscuits depended on treacle, a byproduct of cane sugar refining, which became cheap enough in the nineteenth century for spiced baking to be within reach of ordinary households; the honey in the syrup mixture may help keep the biscuit from being flinty. The absence of any raising agent suggests an older, unleavened style of gingerbread rather than the soda-lightened kinds.