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Rolls, Ginger
Take two ounces of good powdered ginger and a little salt, and mix these ingredients well with two pounds of flour. Make the preparation into a firm but perfectly light dough with German or brewer's yeast, in the usual way. Divide into six or eight small loaves, and bake for about fifteen minutes.
A plain yeast dough carrying an unusually heavy dose of ginger, written for cooks who kept flour, barm and a warm corner as a matter of course. The original assumes you know the bread-making part, so the notes below fill in what it leaves unsaid.
- The ginger is the whole point, and it is a lotTwo ounces of ground ginger to two pounds of flour is roughly half a cup to seven cups — fiercely hot and aromatic by modern taste. Ground ginger of the period may well have been older and weaker than a fresh jar today; start at half the quantity if you want something edible with butter.
- WeightsTwo pounds of flour is about 7 cups, or 900 g. Two ounces of ground ginger is about 55 g. "A little salt" for this quantity of flour means roughly 3 to 4 teaspoons if you want bread that tastes seasoned.
- German or brewer's yeastGerman yeast is compressed fresh cake yeast; brewer's yeast here means barm skimmed from a fermenting brew, not the inactive nutritional flakes sold under that name now. Substitute about 2 teaspoons instant dried yeast, or about 18 g fresh, for 2 lb flour.
- The missing liquidNo water is specified because "in the usual way" covered it. Reckon on about 500-600 ml (2 to 2½ cups) of warm water for 2 lb flour, added gradually — the ground ginger absorbs some moisture, so the dough will feel drier than a plain white one.
- "Firm but perfectly light"That phrase means a stiff dough given a full rise. Knead well, prove until doubled, shape, then prove again until visibly puffed before baking; a stiff dough underproved will bake into bricks.
- Oven heatNone is given. Small loaves in fifteen minutes suggests a brisk oven; somewhere around 425F/220C is a reasonable modern guess rather than anything the recipe specifies. Check for a hollow sound underneath; at 6 to 8 loaves from 2 lb of flour these are large rolls rather than true loaves, and may want longer than the stated fifteen minutes.
- Not a sweet bakeThere is no sugar, treacle or butter here. These are savoury ginger rolls, closer to a spiced bread roll than to gingerbread, and they are best eaten warm the day they are made.
The absence of sugar or treacle marks it out from the gingerbreads that dominate Victorian ginger baking. Ginger was carried in nineteenth-century British kitchens as much for its supposed warming and digestive virtues as for flavour, and ginger-heavy breads and biscuits were often recommended for cold weather and weak stomachs amed a tradition rather than a documented remedy. The instruction to use "German or brewer's yeast" suggests a period before packaged baker's yeast was reliably available, when domestic cooks bought compressed yeast imported in blocks or begged barm from a local brewery, and recipe books might name both because supply of either could not be assumed.