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Honeycomb Gingerbread (Eggless)
1½ pounds treacle 1½ ounces ground ginger ½ ounce ground caraway seeds 2 ounces allspice 4 ounces orange peel (shredded fine) ½ pound sweet butter 6 ounces blanched almonds 1 pound honey 1½ ounces carbonate of soda Five Roses flour to make moderately thick dough ¾ 3/4 3 ounce tartaric acid.
Make a pit in 5 pounds Five Roses flour, then pour in the molasses and all the other ingredients, creaming the butter. Then mix them altogether into a dough. Work it well, then put in 3/4 ounce tartaric acid. Put dough in buttered pan, and bake for 2 hours in a cool oven. know when it is ready, dip a fork into it; if it comes out sticky, put in oven again.
Otherwise, it is ready.
This is a bakery-scale formula rather than a household one, and the text has clearly been garbled in typesetting. Read it as a set of proportions and scale it down before you start.
- The batch sizeFive pounds of flour plus 1½ lb treacle, 1 lb honey and ½ lb butter yields something like nine pounds of dough. Quartering everything gives a manageable single large loaf pan or two 8-inch square pans.
- Treacle and molassesThe ingredient list says treacle, the method says molasses; they are the same thing here. Use dark (not blackstrap) molasses or British black treacle — both are acidic, which is what sets off the soda.
- The mangled acid line"¾ 3 ounce tartaric acid" is a printing error. The method calls for ¾ ounce, roughly 4 teaspoons, added last. Cream of tartar is not a substitute at the same weight; it is a much weaker acid, so you would need something on the order of two to two and a half times as much.
- Carbonate of sodaThat is baking soda. An ounce and a half in five pounds of flour is heavy by modern standards, but it is doing two jobs: reacting with the tartaric acid for lift, and with the molasses for colour and the open, honeycombed crumb the name refers to.
- Add the acid at the very endThis is the hinge. Tartaric acid and soda begin fizzing on contact with the wet dough, so the acid goes in last, is worked through quickly, and the dough goes straight into a buttered pan. A dough left to stand will bake flat and taste soapy.
- A cool ovenPeriod tables generally put a cool oven somewhere between 250F and 300F. Two hours at that heat suits a dense loaf of this size; a quarter batch in a smaller pan will need checking well before the full time.
- Sweet butterUnsalted butter. There is no salt anywhere in the list — a pinch or two per pound of flour is worth adding, as it sharpens the spice.
- The spicingTwo ounces of allspice and 1½ ounces of ginger to five pounds of flour is assertive but not absurd for a keeping gingerbread. The half ounce of ground caraway is the period marker; if it is not to your taste, leave it out rather than replacing it.
- The fork testTesting with a fork rather than a skewer is a fair guide with a dough this wet and sugary, but honey and molasses keep the crumb tacky. Look for no wet dough clinging, not for a bone-dry tester, and let the loaf cool fully — it firms considerably and improves after a day or two wrapped.
Honeycomb gingerbread belongs to the British bakers' tradition of hard, dark, keeping gingerbreads leavened by the reaction of an alkali with treacle and an added acid rather than by eggs — hence "eggless," a selling point in an era when eggs were seasonal and expensive. The pairing of carbonate of soda with tartaric acid is essentially homemade baking powder, mixed by the baker rather than bought ready-blended; the vigorous gassing is what opens the crumb into the pitted, honeycombed texture the name describes. Caraway alongside ginger and allspice is an older English habit, common in gingerbreads and seed cakes well into the nineteenth century and largely gone by the twentieth. The five-pound flour base and the instruction to "make a pit" in it point to a trade recipe, the sort of thing contributed by a working baker; the Five Roses book, published by a Canadian flour miller to promote its product, gathered such formulas from readers across the country alongside plain household fare.