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Imperial Gingerbread
Take twelve ounces of dried flour, and blend with it six ounces of butter. Make into a paste with a pint of cream and six ounces of treacle stirred together by degrees before being added to the flour; the cream is liable to get turned if this is not carefully done. Strew in an ounce of caraway-seeds, with a quarter of a pound of sugar, and half an ounce of powdered ginger. The paste should be stiff. When cut into shapes, stick candied orange or lemon peel on the top, and bake on a tin plate, well buttered. Time, ten to fifteen minutes to bake. Probable cost, 2s. 6d. for this quantity. (See also GINGER-BREAD, IMPERIAL.)
A rolled and cut gingerbread biscuit rather than a cake, rich with cream and treacle. The Victorian measurements need a little interpretation, particularly the liquid.
- The hinge: cream and treacleStir the treacle into the cream slowly and in small additions, as the book insists — acidic treacle dumped into cream will curdle it. Warming both slightly to room temperature makes the blend far easier.
- A pint of cream is almost certainly too muchA pint of cream is likely more than needed -- An imperial pint is 20 fl oz, and that volume against 12 oz of flour would give a batter, not the stiff paste called for. Add the cream-and-treacle mixture by degrees and stop as soon as the dough comes together stiff; expect to use a fraction of it.
- Dried flourFlour was warmed by the fire or in a cool oven to drive off damp before baking, since it was stored in sacks in unheated larders. Modern packaged flour needs no drying.
- TreacleBritish treacle here means dark cane treacle — black treacle or, in the US, unsulphured molasses. Golden syrup gives a paler, milder result and is not the same thing.
- Blending in the butter"Blend with it six ounces of butter" most likely means rubbing cold butter into the flour as for pastry, until it resembles coarse crumbs, before any liquid goes in.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given because none could be. For thin cut biscuits of this kind, 350–375F is right; ten to fifteen minutes at that heat matches the stated time. They firm as they cool, so take them out while the centres still give slightly.
- CarawayAn ounce of caraway seed in this quantity is assertive by current taste. Half that amount reads as period-correct without dominating the ginger.
- Tin plate and shapesA "tin plate" is a flat baking sheet. Butter it well or line with parchment — the treacle and sugar catch easily.
- Yield and costRoughly two to three dozen biscuits, depending on the cutter. The "2s. 6d." is the Victorian household costing the dictionary attached to nearly every entry, useful only as a relative price signal.
Gingerbread in nineteenth-century Britain covered everything from hard fairground snaps stamped with figures to soft treacle loaves, and "imperial" was one of a family of grandiose qualifiers — royal, superior, rich — that publishers used to distinguish one formula from the next in books that might carry a dozen. What marks this version is the cream, an expensive enrichment that pushes the mixture toward a short, biscuit-like paste rather than the plain flour-and-treacle dough of a commercial gingerbread. Caraway alongside ginger is thoroughly of its period: the two seeds shared space in English cake and biscuit baking well into the Victorian era before caraway fell out of favour. The candied orange or lemon peel pressed on top is a remnant of the decorated gingerbreads sold at fairs, where gilding, stamping and applied sweetmeats were part of the trade. Cassell's, published in parts from the 1870s, worked as a reference book more than a teaching one — hence the terse cross-reference at the end to another entry filed under a different heading, and the probable cost given for a mistress checking her cook's accounts.