Home › Cake Making and Baking › Gingerbread
Gingerbread
(This recipe won 1st Prize with Five Roses Flour) 1½ cups Five Roses flour (sifted) ½ cup sour milk ½ cup sugar ½ cup molasses ⅓ cup butter 1 egg (not beaten) 1 teaspoon soda 1 teaspoon ginger.
Don't beat very much. Bake 20 minutes in moderate oven in shallow pan.
A prize-winning entry from a flour-company contest, written in the terse shorthand of a cook who assumed you already knew what gingerbread looked like. Two details need sorting out before you begin.
- The stray line of butterThe recipe lists ⅓ cup butter in the ingredients and then repeats "½ cup butter" at the end, apparently a duplication in the printed text. The smaller figure is the safer reading: use ⅓ cup (about 75 g); ½ cup in a batter built on only 1½ cups flour would be greasy.
- Sour milkNot spoiled milk but naturally soured raw milk, thick and acidic. Buttermilk is the direct substitute; failing that, ½ cup milk with 1½ teaspoons lemon juice or white vinegar, left to stand five minutes.
- Why the acid mattersThe teaspoon of soda needs both the sour milk and the molasses to react against. Substituting sweet milk leaves the soda unneutralized and gives a soapy, faintly metallic taste along with a poor rise.
- Moderate oven350F (175C). Twenty minutes is right for a shallow pan; a thicker cake will need 30 to 35.
- Pan size"Shallow pan" is not defined; for this quantity of batter something in the region of an 8 by 8 inch pan, greased, is a reasonable reading. It should sit no more than an inch deep if 20 minutes is to cook it through.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cooking molasses, not blackstrap, which is far more bitter than the table molasses an early twentieth-century Canadian kitchen would have had on the shelf.
- "Don't beat very much"The single most important line. Stir only until the flour disappears; overworking a soft batter like this one toughens it and the gingerbread bakes dense and rubbery.
- The unbeaten eggAdding it whole and unbeaten is deliberate, part of keeping the mixing minimal. Drop it in with the liquids and combine with a few strokes.
- YieldOne shallow 8-inch square, cut into nine or twelve pieces. Best warm, plain or with whipped cream.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Winnipeg and Montreal and assembled largely from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives who used the brand; the parenthetical note about a first prize marks this as a contest entry, and the abrupt, unedited feel of the text, right down to the duplicated butter, suggests it was set close to as received. Gingerbread of this kind, thin, molasses-dark and leavened with soda against sour milk, was a staple of North American home baking through the nineteenth century, when molasses was cheaper than refined sugar and a jug of milk turning on the pantry shelf was a resource rather than a loss.