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Sponge Ginger Bread
Beat one egg, add to it one-half cup of melted butter, one-half cup of brown sugar and one-half cup of molasses. Dissolve one teaspoon of soda in one-half cup of hot water; add to this one and one-half cups of sifted flour, one teaspoon of cinnamon, one teaspoon of ginger, one-half teaspoon of cloves, and one-half teaspoon of salt. Pour into shallow pans, or patty pans, and bake twenty minutes.
— Mrs. Louis Richardson
A small, one-egg gingerbread of the kind meant to be mixed in a single bowl and eaten the same day. The written order of operations is muddled and needs sorting before you start.
- Fix the mixing orderAs written, the soda water, flour and spices are combined separately from the egg-butter-sugar-molasses mixture, and the two are never explicitly joined. Whisk the dry ingredients and spices together, then add them to the wet mixture alternately with the soda dissolved in hot water, stirring only until smooth.
- No oven temperature is givenTwenty minutes in a shallow pan suggests a moderate oven, so around 350F is a reasonable modern reading. The recipe gives the same twenty minutes for patty pans, but small tins bake faster, so start checking them earlier.
- Patty pansThese are small shallow tins for individual cakes, closest to a modern muffin or cupcake tin. A standard 12-cup tin, filled about two-thirds, takes this batter.
- Molasses, not blackstrapThe molasses sold for table and baking use was generally milder than modern blackstrap. Use unsulphured cooking molasses; blackstrap is bitter and will overwhelm half a cup of brown sugar.
- Hot water is doing workThe hot water loosens the molasses and starts the soda reacting, which is what gives this cake its "sponge" lift. Get the batter into the pan and into the oven promptly rather than letting it stand.
- Leavening balanceOne teaspoon of soda for half a cup of molasses is on the generous side; there is no baking powder here and none is needed. If the crumb tastes faintly soapy, reduce the soda to three-quarters of a teaspoon.
- Pan size and yieldAn 8-inch square pan gives a thin cake in the intended shallow style and serves six to nine. Doubling the recipe for a 9x13 pan will need closer to 30 minutes.
- TestingMolasses cakes look done before they are. Test with a skewer at the center; the top should spring back and the edges just pull from the pan.
Gingerbread in nineteenth-century American cookbooks splits into two families: hard, rolled gingerbread cut into cakes, and "soft" or "sponge" gingerbread poured as a batter and cut into squares. This is the second kind, and "sponge" here most likely describes the light, open crumb produced by soda reacting with molasses rather than any egg-foam method. Molasses was a cheap sweetener of the period, a byproduct of sugar production, which is part of why so many everyday cakes of this era are brown and spiced rather than white and buttery. Recipes credited to a named contributor, as this one is, are characteristic of collections gathered from local cooks.