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Hot Water Gingerbread
1 cup molasses 1 teaspoon soda 1/2 cup boiling water 1 1/2 teaspoons ginger 2 1/4 cups flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 4 tablespoons melted butter Add water to molasses. Mix and sift dry ingredients, combine mixtures, add butter, and beat vigorously. Pour into a buttered shallow pan, and bake twenty-five minutes in a moderate oven. Chicken fat tried out and clarified furnishes an excellent shortening, and may be used in place of butter.
A plain molasses gingerbread leavened entirely by soda reacting with molasses and hot water, with no egg and no milk. It comes together in one bowl in a few minutes.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperatures; "moderate" is generally read as somewhere around 350F. Twenty-five minutes suits a shallow pan; check the centre with a skewer, as an underbaked molasses batter stays gummy.
- Pan size"shallow pan" probably means something like an 8- or 9-inch square, giving a cake around an inch thick. A deeper pan will need longer, perhaps 35 to 40 minutes, and is more likely to sink in the middle.
- Sift the soda with the flourThe single teaspoon of soda is the only leavening, and it must be evenly distributed or the crumb will carry bitter dark streaks. Sifting it with the flour, ginger and salt is not optional here.
- Work fast once combinedThe soda begins reacting with the acid in the molasses immediately, helped along by the boiling water. Beat vigorously, then get it into the pan and the oven without delay.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cane molasses, not blackstrap, which is markedly more bitter and less sweet. Sorghum syrup also works and was widely used as a molasses substitute in this period.
- Chicken fat as shorteningThe suggestion at the end is sound and rendered chicken fat gives a moist, slightly savoury crumb. Substitute the same four tablespoons, melted; since the butter is melted here anyway, another clean mild fat, or even a neutral oil, will do much the same job.
- YieldAn 8-inch square cuts into nine generous squares or sixteen small ones. Best the day it is baked, though the molasses keeps it moist for two or three days wrapped.
Gingerbread of this kind, thin and dark and cut in squares, was an everyday cake in American households rather than a holiday one, and molasses did the sweetening because it was cheaper than sugar well into the nineteenth century. The "hot water" method belongs to the era when baking soda had largely displaced older yeast and pearlash leavenings: the boiling water warms and thins the molasses and quickens the soda's reaction with its acid, so no egg is needed to give lift. The closing note on clarified chicken fat is characteristic of a thrifty domestic-science kitchen, where nothing renderable was thrown out.