Hattie Williams
BOSTON GINGER BREAD
1 cup molasses Blend these two together. 1 piece butter size of an egg 1½ teaspoons of ginger 1 egg Bake in a moderate oven. 1 level teaspoon soda 1 cup milk 2 cups flour (sifted) I offer the above with the sincerest wish that it may not hurt any one's good digestion.
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The ingredient list has been scrambled by the book's two-column layout, so the instructions land in the middle of the ingredients. Read it as a straightforward one-bowl molasses gingerbread: molasses and soda first, then butter, egg, ginger, milk and flour.
- The hinge: molasses and soda"Blend these two together" most likely refers to the molasses and the soda rather than the two lines it sits between, though the scrambled two-column setting makes this a reading rather than a certainty. Stirring the soda into the molasses first lets it foam and neutralise the acid in the molasses, which is what lifts a gingerbread with no baking powder in it.
- Butter the size of an eggA standard nineteenth-century measure: about 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. Soften it rather than melting it, since there is no creaming step to speak of.
- A moderate oven350F. A molasses batter browns fast because of the sugar, so keep it in the middle of the oven and check the edges.
- Pan and timeNo pan is named. An 8-inch square tin, greased, gives a cake about an inch and a half deep that bakes in 30 to 35 minutes; a tester should come out clean and the centre should spring back.
- The ginger quantity"1/2 teaspoons of ginger" is almost certainly half a teaspoon, which is restrained even by the standards of the period. A full teaspoon or more is closer to what most people now expect from gingerbread.
- What is missingThere is no salt and no sugar beyond the molasses. A quarter teaspoon of salt is worth adding; the cake is meant to be dark and only moderately sweet, so resist sweetening it further.
- The milkSweet milk works with the molasses-and-soda reaction. If you have buttermilk or soured milk, it will produce a slightly higher, more tender crumb, which is what many contemporaneous versions of this cake assumed.
- YieldOne 8-inch square, nine generous pieces. Best the day it is made, though molasses keeps it moist for two or three days wrapped.
Community cookbooks assembled from celebrity contributions were a standard fundraising device in the early twentieth century, and the recipes in them tend to be short, domestic and slightly self-deprecating — Hattie Williams, a musical-comedy star of the Broadway stage in that era, signs off with a joke about the reader's digestion that tells you the contribution was meant to be read as much as cooked. The dish itself is the plain New England molasses gingerbread that had been a household staple since the colonial trade in West Indian molasses made it the cheapest sweetener in the American kitchen; "Boston" is often said to have attached itself to the soft, cake-style version to distinguish it from the hard, rolled ginger cakes, though the explanation is traditional rather than documented. The absence of baking powder and the reliance on soda reacting with acidic molasses places the formula squarely in a tradition older than the book, one that home cooks were still writing out from memory long after commercial leaveners were available.