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Soft Gingerbread
3 eggs. 1 teacup butter. 1/2 1/2 teacup ginger. 1 teacup molasses. 3 teacups sifted flour. 1 large tablespoonful of ginger. 1 small teaspoonful of soda, dissolved in 1/2 teacup of sour cream.--Mrs. Mc G.
A short ingredient list with no method and no oven, typical of a manuscript recipe copied into print. Two things need sorting out before you bake: the teacup and the duplicated ginger.
- The ginger is almost certainly a misprintThe list gives both "1/2 teacup ginger" and "1 large tablespoonful of ginger." Half a teacup of ground ginger in three cups of flour would be inedible, and the tablespoon reads as the real spice measure; the first entry most likely stood for sugar in the manuscript. Treat it as ambiguous rather than guessing blind.
- TeacupA nineteenth-century teacup is not the modern standard cup. It is usually reckoned at somewhere around 6 fluid ounces, roughly three-quarters of a cup, though the vessels varied; whatever you settle on, keep it consistent across every teacup measure in the list so the proportions hold.
- Soda and sour creamSoda is bicarbonate of soda, plain baking soda. The sour cream is doing acid duty against it; period sour cream was clabbered raw cream, generally thinner and sharper than the modern cultured tub. Commercial sour cream works, and buttermilk is another reasonable stand-in.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cooking molasses rather than blackstrap, which is markedly more bitter than what a cake like this wants. Sorghum syrup was also common in the South by this date and gives a lighter result.
- Method, since none is givenCream the butter (with the sugar, if you have resolved the disputed first entry that way), beat in the eggs, then the molasses, then alternate the flour with the soda-and-cream mixture. Stir only until combined; the soda begins working the moment it meets the acid.
- OvenNo temperature is given at all; the cook judged her own stove. 350F in a greased 9-inch square or 9x13 pan is a reasonable modern setting.
- Doneness and yieldMolasses cakes brown early and can look done while still wet inside; go by a skewer coming out clean, roughly 30 to 40 minutes depending on pan depth. The quantities make one square pan, about nine to twelve squares.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), edited by Marion Cabell Tyree, was assembled from contributions by named and initialed Virginia housekeepers, which is why this one arrives as a bare list signed "Mrs. Mc G." rather than as a worked method: the compiler was transcribing what women already knew by hand and eye. Soft gingerbread, as distinct from the hard rolled and stamped gingerbread of the fairground, depended on molasses and on a chemical leaven, and its spread through American cookbooks tracks the spread of cheap saleratus and soda in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Molasses was the everyday sweetener in much of the South well after refined sugar became available, being cheaper and, for a dark spiced cake, better suited. The pairing of soda with soured cream or buttermilk is the older technique that baking powder would eventually displace, and recipes like this one preserve the moment before that changeover was complete.