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Nuremberg Gingerbread
Beat four eggs thoroughly; mix with them half a nutmeg, grated, six pounded cloves, two ounces each of candied lemon and citron finely minced, and eight ounces of powdered sugar. Stir these briskly for ten minutes; then add very gradually half a pound of dried flour, a small pinch of salt, and one-eighth of an ounce of carbonate of soda dissolved in a little warm milk. When the ingredients are thoroughly blended, put with them eight ounces of sweet almonds blanched and sliced. Spread the mixture a quarter of an inch thick on wafer-paper, cut it into fingers, place these on buttered tins, and bake in a very moderate oven. Time, about half an hour to bake. Probable cost, 1s. 6d.
A close cousin of German Elisenlebkuchen: a nut-and-spice batter with barely enough flour to hold it together, baked on edible wafer paper. Two details carry the whole recipe — the wafer-paper base and a genuinely gentle oven.
- Wafer paper is not optionalThe batter is sticky and low in flour, and the paper (Oblaten, sold as edible wafer or rice paper) both supports it and stops the sugary underside scorching. It is still made in sheets and rounds for exactly this purpose; baking parchment will work mechanically but must be peeled off after cooling rather than eaten.
- "A very moderate oven"By the usual modern equivalence, somewhere around 300-325F. Anything hotter risks browning the almonds and the sugar before the centre sets. Half an hour at that heat should give fingers that are firm at the edges and still slightly yielding in the middle; they harden as they cool.
- "Dried flour"Victorian kitchens warmed and dried flour by the fire to drive off damp before weighing. Modern packaged flour is already dry — sift it and use it straight. Half a pound is about 1 3/4 cups.
- Carbonate of sodaPlain bicarbonate of soda. One-eighth of an ounce is roughly 3.5 g, a scant teaspoon. There is no acid in the batter to speak of, so it acts as a mild tenderiser and browning agent rather than a real leavener; do not increase it or the fingers will taste soapy.
- Six pounded clovesSix whole cloves, ground: an eighth to a quarter of a teaspoon. With half a grated nutmeg (roughly a teaspoon) that is the entire spicing, which is restrained beside other Lebkuchen recipes; cinnamon, allspice and a little ground cardamom are common in those and can be added if you want them.
- Candied lemon and citronTwo ounces each, meaning the whole candied peel, not the diced supermarket mixed peel with its coating of glucose syrup. Mince it very fine or it tears the thin batter when you spread it.
- Beating the eggs and sugarThe ten minutes of brisk stirring is doing the work a mixer does now: dissolving the sugar and building enough foam to lighten a batter that has almost no leavening. Five minutes on a stand mixer to the ribbon stage is the equivalent.
- Spreading and cuttingSpread to a quarter inch on the paper with a wet palette knife, then cut through batter and paper together into fingers before baking. Trying to cut after baking shatters them.
- YieldRoughly two pounds of batter; the number of fingers depends entirely on how large they are cut, with three dozen or more a fair expectation. They keep several weeks in a tin and, as with most Lebkuchen, are said to improve after a few days.
Nuremberg has been the centre of German gingerbread for centuries, a position generally traced to its place on the medieval spice routes and to the honey and nut supplies of the surrounding Reichswald; a Lebkuchen bakers' guild is recorded there from the seventeenth century. The finest grade, Elisenlebkuchen, is defined by how little flour it contains relative to nuts - the modern German standard allows no more than about a tenth flour - so this recipe, with half a pound of flour against half a pound of almonds and half a pound of sugar, carries far more flour than that grade permits, though it shares the wafer-paper base. The wafer paper is traditionally said to derive from the communion-wafer sheets that monastery bakeries had to hand. The note of "probable cost, 1s. 6d." marks it as a comparatively expensive item, presumably on account of the almonds and candied peel.