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Hard Sugar Gingerbread
3/4 cup butter 5 cups flour 1 1/2 cups sugar 3/4 tablespoon baking powder 3/4 cup milk 1 1/2 teaspoons salt 3/4 tablespoon ginger Cream the butter, add sugar gradually, milk, and dry ingredients mixed and sifted. Put some of mixture on an inverted dripping-pan and roll as thinly as possible to cover pan. Mark dough with a coarse grater. Sprinkle with sugar and bake in a moderate oven. Before removing from pan, cut in strips four and one-half inches long by one and one-half inches wide.
This is a crisp rolled ginger biscuit rather than a soft cake gingerbread o no no molasses only sugar, so it bakes pale gold. The dough is stiff and the whole point is to get it thin.
- OvenA moderate oven is usually reckoned at about 350-375F. Sheets rolled this thin bake quickly, so watch them from around 10 minutes; pull them when the edges have coloured and the surface looks dry, as they crisp further on cooling.
- Odd tablespoon measuresThree-quarters of a tablespoon is 2 1/4 teaspoons. That applies to both the baking powder and the ginger. Use ground ginger that still smells strongly; long-stored ginger loses much of its punch.
- The dripping-panA dripping-pan was the shallow rectangular pan set under a roast, close to a modern half-sheet pan. Inverting it lets you roll the dough right off the edges without a rim in the way; a heavy rimmed baking sheet turned upside down does the same job.
- Roll it thinFive cups of flour to only three-quarters of a cup of milk gives a very dry, crumbly dough. Work it together with your hands until it coheres, then roll in batches, about 1/8 inch or less. Thick pieces will be hard rather than crisp.
- Marking with a graterPressing a coarse box grater over the rolled sheet pebbles the surface and stops the dough puffing. Docking with a fork achieves the same thing if you would rather not press a grater into dough.
- Cut while hotThe recipe says to cut the strips before lifting the sheet from the pan, i.e. while it is still warm. Once fully cool the sheet is liable to break where it likes rather than along the lines.
- Yield and keepingThis is a large batch; the exact count of 4 1/2 by 1 1/2 inch strips depends entirely on how thin you roll, but expect several dozen. Stored airtight they keep crisp for a week or two; damp storage softens them.
Nineteenth-century cookbooks drew a firm line between soft gingerbread, leavened and darkened with molasses, and hard or sugar gingerbread, which used white sugar and was rolled thin to make a keeping biscuit. Hard gingerbread of this sort was long associated with fairs and militia musters in New England, cut into fingers and cakes that travelled well in a pocket or a tin. Rolled and marked gingerbreads sit at the household end of a much older tradition of moulded and stamped gingerbread.