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Cheap Ginger Cakes
3 pints of flour. 1 large spoonful of lard. 2 large spoonfuls of ginger. 1 dessertspoonful of soda in a pint of molasses. --Mrs. H. S. GINGER BUNNS. 3/4 pound butter, 1/2 pound sugar, rubbed to a cream. 1/2 nutmeg. 1 tablespoonful ginger.
Stir all together, then add two eggs well beaten, stir in one pound of flour and moisten with sweet milk, until it can be easily worked. Roll out and bake in quick oven.--Mrs. H. D.
Two separate rolled ginger doughs sit under one heading here, both written in the shorthand of a cook who already knew what the finished dough should feel like. The first is a molasses cake with no sugar, no egg and no liquid but the molasses itself; the second is a rich butter-and-egg bun.
- Flour by the pintThe first recipe measures flour by volume, the second by weight. Three pints is six cups, roughly 1 lb 10 oz of modern all-purpose flour. For the buns, one pound of flour is about three and a half to four cups.
- "Large spoonful" and "dessertspoonful"A large spoonful is a tablespoon; a dessertspoon is two teaspoons. So the first dough gets about 1 tablespoon lard, 2 tablespoons ground ginger and 2 teaspoons soda stirred into a pint (2 cups) of molasses.
- The hinge: mix the soda into the molasses firstThat instruction is doing the entire leavening. The acid in molasses reacts with the soda immediately and the mixture will foam up; add it to the flour at once and get the dough rolled and cut without delay, or the lift is spent on the board.
- Soda strength has changedSoda strength may have differed -- nineteenth-century soda was not always as finely ground or as consistent as today's baking soda, though commercial bicarbonate was widely available by this date. Two teaspoons to two cups of molasses is on the generous side by modern reckoning; a scant measure gives less of the soapy, metallic edge that too much soda leaves.
- Molasses, not blackstrapUse unsulphured dark molasses. Blackstrap is bitter enough to overwhelm the ginger.
- Oven temperatureA quick oven is usually reckoned around 400-425F. That suits the butter-rich ginger buns, but molasses scorches, so the first dough may do better nearer 375F; watch for the edges setting rather than the tops colouring.
- "Sweet milk"Simply fresh whole milk, named to distinguish it from the sour or buttermilk that a period kitchen also had on hand. Add it a spoonful at a time; three-quarters of a pound of butter already carries a good deal of moisture.
- Thickness and yieldRoll both doughs about a quarter-inch thick and cut in rounds. Six cups of flour will give you several dozen small cakes. The first is the cheap one: no eggs, no sugar and no butter, only lard and molasses.
- Texture to expectThese are crisp, snapping ginger cakes of the kind kept in a tin, not soft cookies. They firm up as they cool and improve over two or three days.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named and initialled Virginia housewives, is full of paired recipes like this one, where a plain version and a rich version of the same idea sit side by side under one heading. The distinction mattered: the "cheap" cake is leavened, sweetened and flavoured entirely by molasses, ginger and soda, all cheap staples of the postwar Southern pantry, while the "bunns" call for three-quarters of a pound of butter, half a pound of sugar, eggs and nutmeg, an outlay for company. Ginger cakes rolled thin and baked crisp were a standing item in American households through the whole century, and are often said to have been sold at fairs and militia musters as well as made at home; the technique of dissolving soda directly in the molasses appears again and again in books of this period, the molasses supplying the acid that sets off the soda.