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Gingerbread, Orange
Chop half a pound of candied orange peel very finely, and mix it with one ounce of ground ginger, one nutmeg, grated, three-quarters of a pound of moist sugar, and two pounds and a quarter of flour. Melt three-quarters of a pound of butter in a pound and three-quarters of treacle; stir this well into the rest, and let all stand in a cool place for two or three hours. Roll the paste out on a floured board to the thickness of a quarter of an inch, cut it into fingers, and bake on a buttered tin, leaving a little space between each finger. Beat the yolk of an egg with a little milk, and brush the gingerbread over with it both before and after putting it into the oven. Time to bake, fifteen minutes. Probable cost, 2s. 6d. for this quantity.
A large batch of stiff, unleavened gingerbread fingers of the biscuit type rather than the cake type. The proportions are sound, but almost everything about the ingredients and the scale needs translating.
- Scale it downAs written this is roughly six pounds of dough and will yield a great many fingers. Quartering the recipe (2 oz peel, 1 tbsp ginger, 3 oz sugar, 9 oz flour, 3 oz butter, 7 oz treacle) gives a manageable tray.
- TreacleBritish treacle, in Victorian usage the dark kind rather than golden syrup. Dark molasses is the closest American equivalent. Weigh it rather than measuring by volume, since it clings to everything.
- Moist sugarVictorian "moist sugar" is unrefined soft brown sugar. Light or dark brown sugar both work; dark deepens the colour toward the treacle.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven temperature. A moderate oven, around 350F, suits quarter-inch fingers in fifteen minutes; they will still feel soft when you take them out and firm as they cool.
- No leaveningThere is no soda or baking powder here, so expect a dense, snappish biscuit that keeps for weeks in a tin rather than a risen cake. The result is meant to harden slightly and improve after a day or two.
- The resting periodThe two or three hours in a cool place is the hinge. The melted butter and treacle need time for the flour to absorb them, otherwise the paste is greasy and unrollable and the fingers spread on the tray.
- Whole nutmegOne whole nutmeg grated is roughly 2 to 2 1/2 teaspoons, a substantial amount. Grate it fresh; pre-ground nutmeg at that quantity tastes dusty.
- The double egg washBrushing again after the tray goes into the oven means opening the door partway through baking. It is cosmetic, for gloss, and can be skipped if your oven loses heat badly.
- Candied peelChop it as finely as the recipe insists, near to a mince. Large pieces scorch on the surface of a thin biscuit and make the fingers break when cut.
Gingerbread in this stiff, rolled, treacle-darkened form is much older than the soft spiced loaf often associated with the word, and by the late nineteenth century it belonged as much to the fairground and the baker's tray as to the home kitchen. The recipe sits in a run of gingerbread variations, distinguished from one another mainly by a single addition, and the orange peel here is doing double work: candied peel was one of the standard sweetmeats of the well-stocked Victorian storecupboard, and it also carried its own sweetness and moisture into the paste. The stated cost of 2s. 6d. is a useful reminder of what such a book was for. That was a real sum for a Victorian household, and the quantity produced is correspondingly large: enough to bake once and store the results in a tin.