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Soft Molasses Gingerbread
1 cup molasses 1 egg 1/3 cup butter 2 cups flour 1 3/4 teaspoons soda 2 teaspoons ginger 1/2 cup sour milk 1/2 teaspoon salt Put butter and molasses in saucepan and cook until boiling point is reached. Remove from fire, add soda, and beat vigorously. Then add milk, egg well beaten, and remaining ingredients mixed and sifted. Bake fifteen minutes in buttered small tin pans, having pans two-thirds filled with mixture.
A hot-molasses gingerbread of the kind that appeared in nearly every American cookbook of the period. The soda goes into the boiling molasses rather than the flour, which is the whole character of the method.
- The hinge: soda into hot molassesAdding the soda to the boiling butter-and-molasses mixture makes it foam up dramatically, and the vigorous beating traps that gas. Work quickly from that point on and get the batter into the pans before the foam subsides.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given, which was common in books of this period. For small tins baked fifteen minutes, try 350F; test with a skewer at twelve minutes, since molasses batters darken and scorch on the bottom before the center sets.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured raw milk, thick and acidic. Substitute buttermilk cup for cup, or add 1 1/2 teaspoons lemon juice or white vinegar to a half cup of whole milk and let it stand five minutes.
- Soda quantityNearly two teaspoons for two cups of flour is high by modern standards, but it is doing double duty here: neutralizing both the molasses and the sour milk. Measure it level rather than heaped or the crumb will taste soapy.
- MolassesUse unsulphured dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is far more bitter than what was sold as ordinary cooking molasses. Sorghum syrup can be used, and in some inland and Southern kitchens "molasses" was understood to mean sorghum.
- Pans and yield"Small tin pans" means individual gem or muffin tins. Two-thirds full gives roughly twelve standard muffins; the same batter will bake in an 8-inch square pan, but it needs closer to 25 to 30 minutes.
Soft gingerbread, meaning the cake rather than the crisp rolled biscuit, was a staple sweet of nineteenth-century American baking, molasses being cheap and widely available. The soda-in-hot-molasses technique appears in a number of the domestic science cookbooks of the 1880s and 1890s and is often associated with the Boston Cooking School tradition, where the chemistry of leavening was taught explicitly rather than by feel. Ginger was among the less expensive imported spices, which may help explain why gingerbread rather than another spice cake became the everyday one.