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Gossamer Gingerbread
1/3 cup butter 1/2 cup milk 1 cup sugar 1 7/8 cups flour 1 egg 3 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon yellow ginger Cream the butter, add sugar gradually, then egg well beaten. Add milk, and dry ingredients mixed and sifted. Spread in a buttered dripping-pan as thinly as possible, using the back of mixing-spoon. Bake thirty minutes. Sprinkle with sugar, and cut in small squares or diamonds before removing from pan.
A pale, cakey gingerbread with no molasses at all, baked in a thin sheet and cut while warm. The whole character of it depends on spreading the batter thin, so use the largest shallow pan you have.
- Yellow gingerRead this as ordinary ground dried ginger; "yellow ginger" appears in period sources for the dried spice, though the naming was not consistent. One teaspoon of modern ground ginger is the right amount.
- The dripping-panA dripping-pan was the large shallow pan set beneath a roast; sizes varied, but a half-sheet pan (13 by 18 inches) is a reasonable modern stand-in. Anything much smaller gives a thicker cake and a different texture; butter it well and press the batter out with the back of the spoon as directed.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no temperature and names no oven heat; 350F is a reasonable modern setting for a thin sheet.
- Thirty minutes is too longThirty minutes may be too long -- Batter spread genuinely thin over a half-sheet pan will likely be done well before the stated half hour, perhaps 12 to 18 minutes at 350F, when the surface springs back and the edges begin to color. Watch it rather than trusting the clock.
- The flour measure1 7/8 cups is 1 3/4 cups plus 2 tablespoons. Weigh it if you can: roughly 7 1/2 to 8 ounces (215 to 225 g) of all-purpose flour.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons to under two cups of flour is a heavy hand by current practice. Modern double-acting powder will do; do not let the batter stand before it goes in the oven.
- Cutting and finishingSprinkle the sugar and cut the squares or diamonds while the sheet is still hot in the pan, as instructed. Once cool it shatters rather than cuts.
- YieldA half-sheet pan gives roughly 40 to 50 small squares, enough for a large tea tray.
Nineteenth and early twentieth century American cookbooks distinguished between dark gingerbread, built on molasses, and light or "white" gingerbreads like this one, in which sugar carries the sweetness and ginger stands alone as the flavor. The instruction to spread the batter as thinly as possible and cut it into diamonds suggests a tea-table sweet, closer in spirit to a thin cookie than to a dessert cut in wedges.