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Soft Gingerbread
One cup molasses, one cup of sugar, two eggs, one tablespoon butter, one tablespoon lard, one teaspoon ginger, one teaspoon allspice, one teaspoon soda, a little hot water to dissolve the soda, enough flour to make a batter.
— Mrs. Edgar Washburn
A typical community-cookbook receipt: the proportions are exact where they matter to the cook of 1900 and vague where she trusted her eye. The flour and the liquid are the two things you have to settle yourself.
- "Enough flour to make a batter"Aim for a batter that ribbons thickly off the spoon rather than a dough — roughly 2 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour. Add the last half cup gradually; too much flour is what turns soft gingerbread into a dry brick.
- The hot water is doing two jobsA tablespoon or two dissolves the soda, but the batter as written has little liquid for its flour. Some soft gingerbread receipts of the period add further hot water or milk last; this one does not, so if the batter seems stiff, add extra hot liquid by the spoonful. The heat also loosens the molasses and helps the soda work.
- Soda and molassesThe soda is here to react with the acid in the molasses, not with any added sour milk. Use unsulphured molasses rather than blackstrap, which is markedly more bitter than ordinary table molasses.
- LardOne tablespoon of lard and one of butter is a very small amount of fat for this quantity. Butter alone works, or shortening; either way consider two tablespoons of each if you want a tender crumb.
- OvenThe receipt gives none. Bake at 350F — a moderate oven — in a greased 8- or 9-inch square pan, 30 to 35 minutes, until the center springs back.
- SpicesGround ginger and allspice lose their bite within a year of opening. Measure generously if your jars are old, and a half teaspoon of cinnamon is a period-appropriate addition.
- YieldOne square pan, nine to twelve pieces. Best warm, and it keeps two or three days wrapped.
Nineteenth-century American cooks distinguished sharply between hard gingerbread — the rolled, cut, keepable kind generally regarded as the ancestor of the gingersnap — and soft gingerbread, a cake baked in a pan and eaten fresh, often still warm, with tea or supper. Molasses did the sweetening because it was cheap and always in the house, and it also supplied the acid that made saleratus or soda work, which is why the two travel together in receipt after receipt of this period. Recipes like this one, signed with a contributor's married name, assumed a reader who already knew what a batter should look like and how hot her stove ran, so the author saw no reason to write either down.