Easiest Way
1 cup molasses 1 cup sour cream 2 1/2 cups Gold Medal flour 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg 1/2 cup sugar 1 egg--beaten 1 teaspoon ginger 1 rounding teaspoon soda
This is a molasses gingerbread given the way most turn-of-the-century flour-company pamphlets gave them: an ingredient list and nothing else, on the assumption the cook already knew what to do with it. The gaps are all in the method, so they need filling before you start.
- No method is printedWhisk molasses, sugar, egg and sour cream together, sift the flour with the soda and spices, and stir the dry into the wet just until smooth. Overworking makes it tough; this is a batter, not a dough.
- No oven temperatureA molasses cake of this sort belongs in a moderate oven, 350F. Molasses browns fast, so the top will look done well before the centre is.
- Pan and timeThe quantity fits a greased 8- or 9-inch square pan, roughly 30 to 40 minutes, until a straw comes out clean. In a loaf pan it will need closer to an hour.
- Sour cream then and nowThe sour cream this calls for would have been ordinary cream left to clabber: thinner and sharper than today's cultured sour cream, though not necessarily more acidic. Modern full-fat cultured sour cream works, though the batter will be stiffer; thin it with a spoonful or two of buttermilk if it will not pour.
- A rounding teaspoon of sodaThat means the spoon heaped slightly above level, about 1 1/2 modern level teaspoons. It is the only leavening here, and it needs the acid of both the sour cream and the molasses to work, so do not substitute sweet cream.
- MolassesUse unsulphured light or dark molasses. Blackstrap is far more bitter than what was sold as table molasses at the time and will overwhelm the ginger.
- No added fatThe only fat is what the cream carries, which is why full-fat sour cream matters. Low-fat versions give a dry, rubbery crumb.
- YieldAbout nine generous squares. Molasses cakes of this kind keep well, and are often said to be better the day after baking.
The Gold Medal Flour Cook Book was a piece of milling-industry advertising: Washburn-Crosby, the Minneapolis firm that later became General Mills, distributed cookbooks in which the flour was named by brand in the ingredient lists. The recipes were plain and short, addressed to a cook who needed no coaching. Sour-cream gingerbread of this kind turns up often in farm and small-town cookery, a way of using cream that had turned before it could be churned, with soda supplying the lift that the acid made possible. Molasses and ginger had long been paired, in a period when molasses was among the cheapest sweeteners in the American pantry and ginger among the cheapest spices.