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Gingerbread, Swiss
Take one and a half pounds of flour, six ounces of skinned almonds, one pound of warm honey, one ounce of ground coriander-seeds, one ounce of ground ginger, half an ounce of ground cinnamon, half an ounce of ground cloves, half a gill of orange-flower water, and one ounce of carbonate of soda. Work all these (except the almonds) into an elastic paste; allow it to rest till the next day, covered over in a cold place. Then roll it out, place the whole almonds in rows upon the paste, roll it up, and bake it in a long-shaped buttered tin mould. Probable cost, 2s.
A stiff honey-and-spice dough of the Lebkuchen family, rolled up around whole almonds and baked in a loaf tin. Cassell's gives no oven temperature, no baking time and no yield, so those are the gaps to fill.
- The hinge: the overnight restThe dough is flour, honey and spice with no fat or eggs, the liquid being the honey itself plus a little flower water, so it comes together very stiff. The rest in a cold place gives the flour time to hydrate in the honey, which should make a crumbly mass easier to roll.
- Half a gillIn a British book a gill is 5 fl oz, so half a gill of orange-flower water is about 2.5 fl oz (5 tablespoons). That is a large amount of a strong flavouring by modern standards; a tablespoon or two may be closer to what a modern palate will accept.
- One ounce of carbonate of sodaVictorian books used "carbonate" and "bicarbonate" of soda loosely, and what is meant here is almost certainly the ordinary baking soda of the period. An ounce (roughly 2 tablespoons) to 1.5 lb flour is far more than modern baking uses. The honey is mildly acidic and will take up some of it, but expect an alkaline, faintly soapy note and a dark colour. Reduce it sharply if you want it to taste of ginger rather than soda.
- Warm honeyWarming the honey until it pours is what lets it wet 1.5 lb of flour at all; blood heat is enough. There is no need to take it hot.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Honey doughs scorch, so bake at 325F in a buttered and lined loaf tin, 45 minutes to an hour for a large loaf, until firm and a skewer comes out clean.
- The almonds"Skinned" means blanched — pour boiling water over them, stand a minute, and slip the skins off. They go on whole, in rows across the rolled sheet, so that each slice shows a band of nuts through the spiced paste.
- Yield and keepingThe ingredients come to roughly 3 lb of dough, which is a very large loaf or two smaller tins. Like other honey gingerbreads it is hard when first baked and softens over several days wrapped closely.
- "Probable cost, 2s"Two shillings; Cassell's gives a probable cost for most of its dishes. The honey, almonds and spices would have been the expensive part, the flour and soda the cheapest.
Cassell's calls it Swiss, and the recipe belongs squarely to the Alpine and south-German tradition of honey Lebkuchen — doughs of flour, honey and ground spice, often with little or no egg or butter, left to mature before baking, of which Basler Läckerli and the almond-filled Appenzeller Biber are the best-known Swiss survivors. The coriander seed points the same way: it is standard in Swiss and Basel spice mixes alongside the cinnamon, clove and ginger, though it turns up in older English gingerbread too. Rolling whole blanched almonds into a sheet of paste and baking it in a long tin puts the cake in the same family as the filled, moulded honey cakes that were the work of specialist Lebküchner guilds rather than domestic cooks. Its appearance in a late-Victorian British dictionary of cookery reflects the period's appetite for continental novelties, and the note that the dough must "rest till the next day" is a faint echo of the older practice — often described in German sources — of storing honey dough for weeks or even months before it was baked.