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Orange Gingerbread
Put three-quarters of a pound of fresh butter into a jar with a pound and three-quarters of best treacle, and place the vessel near the fire until the butter is dissolved. Beat the ingredients well together, let them cool a little, then stir them into two pounds and a quarter of fine flour. Add three-quarters of a pound of moist sugar, one ounce of ground ginger, one ounce of allspice, and half a pound of candied orange-peel cut into thin shreds. When the ingredients are thoroughly mixed, put them aside for some hours. Roll the mixture out to the thickness of half an inch. Divide it into fingers, squares, or any form which may be preferred; brush these over with a little milk mixed with yolk of egg, and bake them on buttered tins in a cool oven. The cakes should be placed an inch apart from one another on the tins. Time to bake, a quarter of an hour. Probable cost, 3s. (See also GINGERBREAD, ORANGE.)
A large, unleavened treacle gingerbread of the old biscuit type — closer to a hard spice slab than to a soft cake. The quantities make a very big batch, so halving or quartering is sensible.
- Weights in metric340g butter, 795g treacle, 1kg plain flour, 340g soft brown sugar, 28g ground ginger, 28g ground allspice, 225g candied orange peel. Halve everything for a domestic batch; the full quantity yields roughly 2.8kg of dough.
- Treacle"Best treacle" here means black treacle, not golden syrup. Unsulphured molasses is the closest widely available substitute; blackstrap is too bitter for this quantity.
- Moist sugarVictorian "moist sugar" is unrefined or partly refined soft sugar — light or dark soft brown sugar today, not granulated.
- The rest is the pointThe rest -- The recipe directs that the mixed dough be put aside for some hours. The flour hydrates and the treacle stiffens as it cools; straight from the bowl the dough is likely to be too slack to roll cleanly.
- A cool ovenRoughly 275-300F (140-150C). The sugar and treacle content means these scorch easily; at a hotter setting the edges will be black before the centres set. The quarter of an hour the recipe gives suits half-inch fingers at that sort of heat.
- No raising agentThere is no saleratus, soda or baking powder in the list. Expect a dense, firm biscuit that hardens on cooling and softens again after a few days in a tin -- the keeping sort of gingerbread.
- An ounce of allspiceThat is a full 28g against the same weight of ginger, and it reads as heavy to modern palates. Scale it back to taste if you prefer the ginger forward; the recipe will not suffer structurally.
- Glaze and spacingMilk beaten with an egg yolk gives the dark gloss. The inch of spacing matters because the dough spreads a little as the butter melts.
- YieldThe full quantity gives roughly 80-100 fingers depending on how you cut them. They keep for weeks in an airtight tin and improve in the first week.
Gingerbread of this kind — treacle, flour, butter and spice, rolled and cut into fingers or squares — was the standard commercial and household form in nineteenth-century Britain, sold at fairs and markets long before it was a Christmas speciality. The heavy hand with treacle reflects its cheapness: it was the by-product of cane sugar refining and, unlike loaf sugar, carried no great expense. Candied orange peel had a similar logic; imported peel was preserved in sugar to keep, and served in baking as a way of getting citrus flavour out of season. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, compiled in the last quarter of the century for a middle-class readership, characteristically gives a quantity large enough to fill a household tin and lists the probable cost.