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Soft Gingerbread
½ cup brown sugar ½ cup sour milk 2 teaspoons soda 1 cup molasses 1½ cups Five Roses flour 1 teaspoon mixed spices 1 teaspoon ginger 2 tablespoons shortening.
Note-One cup raisins sometimes used.
Measure the flour and spices into a sieve. Measure brown sugar and egg into mixing bowl and stir until he sugar is dissolved. Measure sour milk and dissolve in it half the soda. Heat the molasses, and add remaining soda. Stir the egg and sugar until the latter is dissolved, then add sour milk and molasses with the dissolved soda. Sift in the flour and spices.
Lastly stir in the shortening, which has been melted in baking tin. Bake about 25 minutes in quick oven. Bake either in gem pans or in a ginger cake tin.
A plain sour-milk gingerbread of the pre-baking-powder school, leavened entirely by soda reacting with the acid in the milk and molasses. The ingredient list omits the egg the method calls for; assume one.
- The missing eggThe method says to beat brown sugar with an egg, but no egg appears in the ingredient list. Use one large egg.
- Sour milkThis means naturally clabbered raw milk, not spoiled pasteurized milk. Use buttermilk, or add 1½ teaspoons lemon juice or vinegar to ½ cup whole milk and let it stand five minutes.
- Why the soda is splitHalf dissolves in the sour milk and half goes into the warmed molasses; the recipe does not say why, though it puts some soda into each of the two acidic ingredients. Two teaspoons for 1½ cups of flour is high by modern standards but plausible here, since both the molasses and the soured milk are acidic and consume it.
- Work quicklyThe soda begins reacting the moment it meets the acid. Have the pan greased and the oven hot before you combine anything, and get the batter into the tin without delay.
- Heating the molassesThe recipe says only to heat it; warm it, do not boil it. Adding soda to hot molasses makes it foam up, so use a pan with room to spare.
- Oven temperatureA "quick oven" is usually reckoned at about 400–425°F. Molasses and brown sugar scorch readily, so use the lower end; the recipe gives about 25 minutes for either tin, so begin testing before that in gem pans.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-wheat household flour, close enough to modern all-purpose. Measure by scooping and levelling, as the book intends, or use about 190 g.
- Melting the shortening in the tinA sensible economy: the fat greases the pan and warms in the oven at the same time. Pour off the melted fat into the batter and leave the film behind. The recipe specifies only "shortening," which in this period would ordinarily be lard or a vegetable shortening; butter works and tastes better.
- YieldAbout 12 gem-pan cakes, or one 8-inch square. Best eaten the day it is baked, or warmed the next.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and became one of the most widely distributed cookbooks in Canada. Soft gingerbread of this kind — sour milk and soda, and a heavy hand with ginger — belongs to a long North American tradition that predates reliable baking powder: the acid in clabbered milk and in cane molasses was the leavening system, and a household that kept a milk pan and a molasses jug could raise a cake without buying anything. The note that "one cup raisins sometimes used" is characteristic of the book, which gives proportions and a reminder of which flour to buy.