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To make plain gingerbread
Mix three pounds of flour with four ounces of moist sugar, half an ounce of powdered ginger, and one pound and a quarter of warm treacle; melt half a pound of fresh butter in it; put it to the flour and make it a paste; then form it into nuts or cakes, or bake it in one cake.
A plain, unleavened gingerbread dough of the older English type: flour, sugar, ginger, treacle and butter, worked warm and baked either as small "nuts" or one large slab. It scales down cleanly by thirds or quarters.
- The hinge: keep it warmThe treacle and melted butter must go into the flour while still warm or the dough will not come together into a smooth paste. Work it quickly on a warmed surface; once it cools it becomes crumbly and stiff to handle.
- TreacleBritish treacle here means dark treacle, closest to American blackstrap-adjacent molasses. Unsulphured dark molasses is the right substitute; golden syrup will give a much paler, sweeter, softer result. One pound and a quarter is about 1 3/4 cups.
- Moist sugarNineteenth-century "moist sugar" is unrefined sugar that retained some molasses. Light brown sugar is the closest modern equivalent. Four ounces is a generous 1/2 cup packed.
- Quantities in modern termsThree pounds of flour is roughly 11 cups, half an ounce of ginger about 2 1/2 tablespoons, half a pound of butter two sticks. The ginger is modest for the volume of flour; increase it if you want the pronounced heat of a modern gingerbread.
- No raising agentThere is no saleratus, soda or yeast, so expect a dense, hard, biscuit-like gingerbread rather than a cake crumb. Unleavened gingerbreads of this sort keep well.
- OvenThe original names no heat. Bake small nuts at 350F for 10 to 15 minutes, until firm at the edges and just set in the middle; a single thick cake wants 325F for 45 minutes to an hour, tested with a skewer.
- "Nuts"Gingerbread nuts are small balls of dough, walnut-sized, spaced apart on the sheet. They spread little without leavening, so flatten them slightly if you want an even bake.
- Yield and keepingThe full batch makes something near five pounds of dough, or several dozen nuts. Stored airtight it softens over several days.
Plain gingerbread of this kind sits at the older, harder end of the family: no eggs, no leavening, just flour bound with warm treacle and spice, a formula associated with the fairground gingerbread and gingerbread "nuts" sold at English markets and fairs. Treacle, the dark by-product of sugar refining, was considerably cheaper in Britain than refined sugar, which is why so many nineteenth-century domestic gingerbreads lean on it for both sweetness and moisture while using only a few ounces of actual sugar. Ginger itself was an old and well-established import, long past the point of luxury by the time books like this were printed. The instruction to form the dough "into nuts or cakes, or bake it in one cake" is characteristic of receipt collections aimed at households rather than professional bakers: one dough, several shapes, and no fixed oven time.