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Gingerbread, Powder for Making
Pound thoroughly in a mortar two ounces of coriander-seed, two ounces of caraway-seed, two ounces of ground ginger, half an ounce of grated nutmeg, half an ounce of cloves, three-quarters of an ounce of fennel-seed, and three-quarters of an ounce of aniseed. Keep the powder in a bottle, closely corked. To make gingerbread, dissolve two pounds of sugar in a pint of water, and make up into a paste with a quartern of flour and an ounce of the powder. The gingerbread may be baked either in a mould or in small tins. Time to prepare, half an hour.
Two recipes in one: a keeping spice blend, and a plain sugar-and-water gingerbread paste that uses an ounce of it. The gingerbread is the older, harder sort — no butter, no egg, no raising agent — closer to a fairground biscuit than to a cake.
- A quartern of flourA quartern is a quarter of a peck, reckoned at about 3½ lb of flour. With 2 lb sugar and a pint of water, that gives a very stiff paste of roughly 6¾ lb — enough for several dozen small tins. Halve or quarter the whole thing for a domestic batch.
- Pint means imperialCassell's pint is 20 fl oz, not 16. If you are working from US cups, use 2½ cups of water to the full quantity.
- The spice yieldThe powder comes to 8½ oz, so a single batch carries you through eight or so of these gingerbreads. Ground seeds lose their volatiles within a few months; a tightly corked bottle is the original's advice and still the right one.
- GrindingCoriander, caraway, fennel and anise all grind cleanly in an electric spice mill; the cloves and nutmeg are the hard work in a mortar. Sieve the powder after grinding to catch the fibrous husks of the fennel and coriander.
- Dissolving the sugarHeat the water to dissolve the sugar rather than stirring it cold, then let the syrup cool to blood heat before it goes near the flour. Boiling syrup on flour will set lumps you cannot work out.
- No leavening, no fatThere is neither butter nor soda here, so expect a dense, chewy, snap-type gingerbread that hardens as it cools and keeps for weeks. Modern soft gingerbread depends on treacle, butter and bicarbonate of soda, none of which appear.
- OvenNo temperature is given. A moderate oven — 350°F / 180°C — suits small tins, 15 to 20 minutes for thin shapes; a large moulded piece wants nearer 325°F / 165°C and 35 to 45 minutes. The paste browns fast because it carries so much sugar.
- "Time to prepare, half an hour"That is the pounding and mixing only. Baking is additional, and the paste benefits from an hour's rest before it is rolled or moulded.
Gingerbread in this style belongs to a long European tradition in which the dominant flavour is not ginger alone but a compound spice — the aniseed, fennel, coriander and caraway here are the same family of seeds that flavour French pain d'épices and the pressed and moulded gingerbreads of the Low Countries and Germany. Keeping a ready-pounded jar of the mixture would have saved the considerable labour of a mortar each time. The moulds mentioned in the last line suggest the fairground and market trade: carved wooden boards stamped figures, kings and animals into a stiff sugar-and-flour paste, which was baked hard and sold to be gnawed rather than sliced. By the time Cassell's compiled this dictionary in the later nineteenth century, softer treacle-and-soda gingerbreads were well established in the domestic oven, and recipes like this one read as a survival of the older, drier article.