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Gingerbread, White
Rub three ounces of fresh butter into half a pound of flour; add a pinch of salt, four table-spoonfuls of sifted loaf sugar, the finely-chopped rind of a small lemon, half a nutmeg, grated, and as much carbonate of soda as will lie on a sixpence, dissolved in half a cupful of lukewarm milk. Mix all together to a smooth, firm batter, roll it out on a floured board, stamp it into rounds with the top of a wine-glass, and bake immediately in a moderate oven. Time to bake, a quarter of an hour. Probable cost, 6d. for this quantity.
A short, pale spice biscuit rather than a cake, and despite the name there is no ginger in it at all. The whole recipe hinges on judging the liquid: half a cupful of milk is more than this quantity of flour usually wants.
- Quantities in metric3 oz butter is about 85 g; half a pound of flour is 225 g. Four tablespoonfuls of sifted sugar is roughly 50 g.
- Loaf sugar, siftedLoaf sugar was refined sugar sold in a hard cone and broken up at home; "sifted" means crushed and passed through a sieve. Caster sugar is the direct modern equivalent.
- Carbonate of soda on a sixpenceA sixpence was a small coin about 19 mm across, so perhaps a quarter-teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda, give or take. With no acid in the mixture it gives only slight lift and a faint softening of the crumb.
- The milkAdd the milk gradually. Half a cupful (somewhere around 120-140 ml, depending on the cup) will often give a sticky mass rather than the "smooth, firm batter" that can be rolled; stop when the dough just holds together, and expect to leave some behind.
- Moderate oven350F / 175C. At that heat a quarter of an hour is right for thin rounds; they should be set and barely coloured, since browning defeats the point of a white gingerbread.
- Stamping with a wine-glassWine-glass rims varied, but around 2 inches is a fair guess, so use a 5 cm cutter. Roll about 6 mm thick.
- Bake immediatelyOnce the dissolved soda is in, the mixture should not stand. Have the tray and oven ready before mixing.
- YieldTwo dozen or more, depending how thin you roll. They keep well in a tin and firm up considerably as they cool.
"White gingerbread" is an older survival in English baking: before treacle became cheap and widespread in the eighteenth century, gingerbread could mean a sweetened, spiced paste that was pale rather than dark, and pale versions are often said to have been thought the more genteel. By the time Cassell's dictionary was compiled in the later nineteenth century the word gingerbread had largely come to mean the dark, treacle-heavy slab sold at fairs, and recipes like this one survive as a curiosity -- a lemon-and-nutmeg biscuit still filed under gingerbread by tradition rather than by flavour. The costing of 6d. for the batch, given as a matter of course throughout the book, suggests an audience of households running to a weekly budget, for whom the price of a recipe was as much a part of it as the method.