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Indian Gingerbread
Put a small tea-cupful of water into a saucepan, and stir well in it, over a slow fire, three-quarters of a pound of pounded sugar and four ounces of butter until they are dissolved; then work the mixture into one pound of good dry flour spiced with pounded ginger, cinnamon, and cloves--two ounces of ginger to half an ounce of cinnamon and cloves mixed. Bake on tins, either in nuts or cakes. Time, about a quarter of an hour. Probable cost, 1s. 6d.
A hot, hard, unleavened gingerbread of the biscuit type rather than the soft cake most people now expect. The method is essentially a hot sugar syrup worked into spiced flour, and it wants speed.
- Work the dough while it is hotWork the dough while it is warm -- the recipe does not say so explicitly, but the syrup of sugar, butter and water is made over the fire and then worked into the flour, so it is presumably meant to go in warm; a cooled sugar-and-butter paste is harder to distribute evenly through flour.
- The spice quantity is not a misprintThe recipe gives the spices as a proportion, two ounces of ginger to half an ounce of cinnamon and cloves mixed, which if read against the pound of flour is roughly ten tablespoons of ginger and ferociously hot by modern taste. Cooks wanting a familiar result may prefer a quarter of that quantity.
- A small teacupfulRead this as about 5 fl oz (150 ml). Victorian teacups ran smaller than modern mugs, and the water is only there to dissolve the sugar, so err on the low side and add a spoonful more if the dough will not come together.
- Pounded sugarLoaf sugar crushed in a mortar, i.e. ordinary granulated or caster sugar. Twelve ounces of it to a pound of flour.
- No raising agentThere is no saleratus, soda or ammonia here, so expect a dense, crisp, snapping biscuit rather than anything risen. That is the intended texture.
- Nuts or cakes"Nuts" are small balls of dough about the size of a hazelnut, spaced well apart; "cakes" are flat rounds cut or rolled thin. Both spread a little.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, and the book supplies no oven term to convert. A modern cook might try a moderate oven, around 350F/180C, for the stated quarter of an hour, with small nuts checked nearer 10 minutes. They firm as they cool.
- YieldA pound of flour with the sugar, butter and water makes something over two pounds of dough; the number of pieces will depend entirely on how small the nuts are rolled. Store airtight.
Gingerbread in the British tradition split early into two lines: the soft, treacle-dark loaf of the north, and the hard spiced biscuit sold at fairs as "gingerbread nuts" and stamped or gilded into shapes. This recipe belongs squarely to the second, and its use of white sugar rather than treacle marks it as the more expensive, genteel version. The name "Indian" here is often said to point at the spicing rather than any Indian origin, ginger, cinnamon and cloves being the trade goods most associated with the East India routes, though this remains a traditional reading rather than a documented one. Cassell's gives a probable cost of 1s 6d, a figure the book supplies throughout so a household could judge whether a dish was worth attempting.