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Gingerbread Without Butter
Cut into very thin slices four ounces of candied lemon, orange, and citron. Mix them with an ounce of ground ginger, half an ounce of coriander-seed, and half an ounce of caraway-seed. Stir these into one pound of treacle, and add as much flour as will make a smooth paste. Pour into an oven-tin, and bake in a brisk oven. This gingerbread will keep some time, if kept closely covered in tin boxes. Time, ten or fifteen minutes to bake. Probable cost, 1s.
A leavening-free, fat-free treacle gingerbread of the old hard-baked type — closer to a spiced biscuit slab than to a cake. Two things decide whether it works: how thin you spread it and how quickly it comes out of the oven.
- Spread it thinWith no butter and no raising agent, this dough will not rise or spread on its own. Press or roll it into the tin no more than a quarter-inch thick, or the ten-to-fifteen-minute bake will leave the middle raw and gummy.
- TreacleBlack treacle is the intended sweetener; unsulphured molasses is the closest US equivalent, and one pound is about 1 1/3 cups. Golden syrup gives a much paler, milder result and is not the same thing.
- "As much flour as will make a smooth paste"Expect roughly 3 to 3 1/2 cups of plain flour for a pound of treacle, added gradually until the mass is stiff enough to handle but still tacky. This is the one genuinely open measurement in the recipe and it varies with the thickness of your syrup.
- A brisk ovenBrisk is usually reckoned somewhere around 400-425F. That is hot for a sugar-heavy dough, which is why the bake is so short — start checking well before the stated time. Treacle scorches bitter well before the surface looks dark to the eye.
- The seedsHalf an ounce each of coriander and caraway seed is roughly two to two and a half tablespoons apiece. Bruise them in a mortar rather than leaving them whole; whole caraway in a hard slab is unpleasant to bite.
- Candied peelThe wording is ambiguous: four ounces may be the total for the three peels or four ounces of each. Buy whole candied peel in caps or strips and slice it yourself if you can — the pre-diced supermarket mix is drier and mostly sugar. Citron may need a specialist grocer.
- Tin and yieldA 9x13-inch tin is about right, though this quantity of dough may run thicker than the quarter-inch above. Score into fingers or squares while still warm and break along the lines once cold; it becomes hard and unforgiving of a knife.
- KeepingThe advice to store it closely covered in tins is sound — with no butter to go rancid, it keeps well and softens slightly as the treacle draws moisture. A slice of apple in the tin will hasten that.
- Probable costOne shilling, a Victorian household figure for the whole tray, listed so a cook could budget the dish against the day's other baking.
Butterless gingerbreads are the older branch of the family: for centuries gingerbread meant honey or treacle stiffened with breadcrumbs or flour and spice, pressed into moulds or slabs, with little or no fat, eggs or raising agent — the cake-like buttered version appears from the eighteenth century, and chemical raising agents only in the nineteenth, running alongside the plainer sort rather than replacing it. The coriander and caraway are plausibly a survival of older spicing, when gingerbread was as much a comfit or sweetmeat as a baked good, and candied citron and orange peel were a luxury flourish on a dough that otherwise cost little. Treacle, a by-product of sugar refining, became reliably cheap in Britain through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which is why so much northern English gingerbread is dark and hard rather than golden and soft.