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Gingerbread Sugar
Whisk well two fresh eggs, and add gradually half a pound of sifted loaf sugar, half an ounce of ground ginger, and half a pound of fine flour. A little water may be added if the paste is too stiff. Make into round cakes and bake for fifteen minutes on a buttered tin. Probable cost, 6d. for this quantity.
A treacle-free gingerbread — essentially a stiff egg-and-sugar paste with ginger, closer to a crisp biscuit than the dark sticky cake the name suggests. The original omits an oven temperature, so the main decisions are heat and thickness.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined cane sugar sold in a hard cone and broken up as needed; "sifted" means crushed and passed through a sieve. Ordinary caster sugar is the direct modern equivalent, and granulated will do if you grind it briefly.
- WeightsHalf a pound is 8 oz (225 g) each of sugar and flour; half an ounce of ground ginger is roughly 14 g, or about six to seven level teaspoons — a strong but deliberate dose in a dough with no other flavouring.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no temperature. For small flat cakes baked fifteen minutes, a moderate oven — around 350F (180C) — is a reasonable modern starting point; much hotter and the high sugar content may colour the edges before the centre sets.
- No raising agentThere is no saleratus, soda or baking powder here — the two whisked eggs are the only lift. Expect a dense, crisp-edged cake rather than anything soft or risen, and whisk the eggs until genuinely frothy before adding the sugar.
- "Too stiff"Flour absorbency and egg size both vary, so the water is a judgement call. Add it a teaspoon at a time until the paste just holds together and can be shaped; a wet dough will spread into one sheet on the tin.
- Buttered tinA buttered baking sheet, not a cake tin. Sugar-heavy doughs stick badly, so butter generously or use parchment, and lift the cakes off while still warm — they harden as they cool.
- YieldThe quantity makes roughly 18 to 24 small round cakes about 2 inches across. They keep well in a tin.
Nineteenth-century cookery tended to distinguish, if loosely, between the dark treacle gingerbreads of fairs and markets and the paler "sugar" or "white" gingerbreads made for the tea table, of which this is one: no molasses, no butter, just eggs, sugar, flour and a heavy hand with the ginger. The distinction is often said to have been partly one of cost and respectability with street-sold gingerbread nuts, while refined loaf sugar was expensive enough that Cassell's felt obliged to note the sixpence outlay for the batch, as it does throughout the Dictionary. Ground ginger itself had long since ceased to be a luxury by the time this book was compiled in the 1870s, arriving in quantity, which is why a recipe this plain can afford half an ounce of it.