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Gingerbread (Without Butter, Milk or Eggs)
1 cup brown sugar 1 cup blackstrap 1 tablespoon meat fryings 1 cup boiling water To 1 teaspoon soda dissolved in boiling water 1 teaspoon ginger Five Roses flour to make thin batter.
Bake slowly in moderate oven. Any desired frosting may be used.
An economy gingerbread that leans entirely on molasses, soda and fat rendered from meat. The original gives no flour quantity, no pan and no time, so those are the gaps to fill.
- Flour quantity is left to judgmentWith two cups of liquid (the molasses and the boiling water) plus a cup of sugar, a thin batter will probably take somewhere in the region of 2 1/2 to 3 cups of all-purpose flour — pourable, closer to a heavy pancake batter than a stiff cake batter. Add it gradually and stop while the batter still runs off the spoon in a ribbon; this style of gingerbread dries out badly if thickened too far.
- BlackstrapBlackstrap is the final, darkest molasses from sugar refining: bitter, mineral, barely sweet. A full cup of it is assertive. Ordinary dark cooking molasses gives a rounder, sweeter result if blackstrap is not to hand, and the two are not interchangeable in flavour.
- Meat fryingsRendered bacon fat, beef drippings or lard, whatever the pan gave up that week. Bacon fat will read savoury against the ginger; leaf lard or a neutral shortening keeps the flavour cleaner, though the book expresses no preference. One tablespoon of fat in a whole cake is very little, which is the point of the recipe.
- Soda in boiling waterDissolve the teaspoon of soda in the cup of boiling water and combine with the molasses — the reaction starts immediately and the batter will foam. Mix, pan and bake without delay, since there is no egg and no second leavener to hold anything in reserve.
- OvenThe instruction is contradictory: "bake slowly" in a "moderate oven." Take the slower reading, 325F, which suits a dark molasses batter that scorches before its centre sets. A 9-inch square pan, greased and lined, will need roughly 35 to 45 minutes; a skewer should come out clean and the top spring back.
- Five Roses flourThe house flour of the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, a hard-wheat Canadian all-purpose. Modern all-purpose flour substitutes directly.
- Yield and keepingAbout nine generous squares. Molasses cakes improve on the second day; wrap the cooled cake tightly rather than frosting it straight away. The suggested frosting is optional and, given how dark and bitter blackstrap is, a plain water icing or whipped cream is more useful than a rich buttercream.
Gingerbread without butter, milk or eggs belongs to a whole family of thrift cakes that show up in North American cookbooks whenever those three things were dear or rationed − a category that later produced the well-known wartime "eggless, milkless, butterless" cake. The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company as advertising for its flour, and it collected recipes contributed by household cooks across Canada — which may help explain why the measurements are casual and the flour quantity is simply left to the baker's eye. Molasses does much of the work here: it supplies sweetness, colour, moisture and the acid that the soda needs, so a cake can be raised and kept tender with nothing more than a spoonful of pan drippings for fat. Blackstrap was the cheapest grade available, a by-product of sugar refining rather than a delicacy, and its presence in a recipe is usually a fair sign of a household counting its pennies.