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Fairy Gingerbread
1/2 cup butter 1/2 cup milk 1 cup light brown sugar 1 7/8 cups bread flour 2 teaspoons ginger Cream the butter, add sugar gradually, and milk very slowly. Mix and sift flour and ginger, and combine mixtures. Spread very thinly with a broad, long-bladed knife on a buttered, inverted dripping-pan. Bake in a moderate oven. Cut in squares before removing from pan. Watch carefully and turn pan frequently during baking, that all may be evenly cooked. If mixture around edge of pan is cooked before that in the centre, pan should be removed from oven, cooked part cut off, and remainder returned to oven to finish cooking.
This is a wafer, not a cake: there is no leavening and no egg, and the whole success of it lies in spreading the batter thin enough to see the pan through it.
- Spread it paper-thinThe batter should go on in a translucent film, not a layer; much thicker than that and it bakes to a chewy slab rather than a snapping wafer. An offset palette knife does the job well in place of the broad, long-bladed knife the original calls for.
- The inverted dripping-panA dripping-pan was the shallow rectangular roasting pan that sat under a joint. Turning it upside down gave a flat, rimless surface to spread on and to slide a knife across. A heavy rimmed baking sheet, buttered and used bottom-side up, is the nearest modern equivalent.
- Oven temperature"Moderate oven" is conventionally read as somewhere around 350F; the recipe itself gives no figure. Given the thinness, start checking early -- a matter of only a few minutes may be the whole of it, and the wafers go from pale gold to burnt very quickly.
- The odd flour measure1 7/8 cups is 1 3/4 cups plus 2 tablespoons, roughly 240 g of bread flour. All-purpose can be substituted, though the result may be softer and more crumbly.
- Add the milk slowly for a reasonCreamed butter and sugar will split if cold milk goes in fast, and a broken batter spreads in ridges instead of a smooth film. Have the milk at room temperature and dribble it in.
- Uneven bakingThe instruction to cut off the done edges and return the centre is sound practice, not fussiness. Thin batter on a large pan always sets at the perimeter first. Turning the pan once halfway through reduces the problem; rotating it in an oven with hot spots reduces it further.
- Cut while hotScore into squares the moment the pan leaves the oven. Once cool the sheet shatters at random, which is fine for eating but not for serving.
- Yield and keepingThe recipe states no yield; it depends entirely on the size of the pan and how thin the batter is spread. Stored airtight the squares stay crisp for about a week; humidity softens them, and a few minutes in a low oven brings the snap back.
Fairy gingerbread belongs to a family of wafer-thin ginger biscuits that turn up throughout late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cookery books, and the version here -- butter, milk, light brown sugar, no molasses, no leavening -- is the form associated with the Boston Cooking-School tradition, from which many domestic-science manuals of the period borrowed. The name is usually taken to refer to the delicacy of the thing rather than to any folklore, though this is not documented. The absence of molasses is worth noting, since dark, heavily spiced molasses gingerbread was the older and commoner form; brown sugar alone gives a pale, buttery wafer rather than a homely one.