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Ginger Bread (Pinch salt C shortening egg C)
Pinch salt 12 C shortening 1 egg 1 C sour milk 1 t soda in the molasses Little ginger and cloves 2½ C flour (heaping) 1 C molasses Mrs. Thos. Corlett. 56
A community-cookbook shorthand recipe: an ingredient list with one procedural hint and no oven, pan or time. Everything below fills those gaps.
- The garbled shortening measure"12 C shortening" is a lost fraction, almost certainly ½ cup — the standard proportion against 2½ cups flour. A full cup would make the crumb greasy and heavy; twelve cups is impossible.
- Soda in the molassesThe one instruction the writer bothered to give. Stir the teaspoon of soda into the cup of molasses before anything else; it foams up pale and doubles in volume, and this pre-reaction is what lifts a molasses batter and softens its bite. Have the pan greased before you start.
- Sour milkClabbered raw milk, which no longer exists in a supermarket. Use 1 cup buttermilk, or 1 cup whole milk with a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar stirred in and left ten minutes.
- ShorteningIn a church cookbook of this kind this means lard or a hydrogenated vegetable fat. Softened butter works and tastes better; melted and cooled butter is fine too, since there is no sugar to cream it against.
- "Little ginger and cloves"Assume the cook's own hand. A reasonable reading is 1 to 2 teaspoons ground ginger and ¼ teaspoon ground cloves; a half teaspoon of cinnamon is not in the original but is at home here.
- No sugar, by designThe molasses is the entire sweetener, so the cake is dark, moist and only moderately sweet. Blackstrap will be harsh.
- Oven and panBake in a greased 8-inch square or 9-inch round pan at 350°F for 30 to 35 minutes, until the center springs back. A moderate oven is essential — molasses scorches at the edges well before the middle sets if you push it higher.
- YieldOne 8-inch square cake, nine generous squares. Best warm with butter, and better still the next day once the crumb has settled.
Sour-milk gingerbread was a workhorse cake of the American Midwest kitchen, and the reason is chemical rather than sentimental: a household with a milk cow always had milk on the turn, and the acid in it plus soda in molasses gave reliable lift. Recipes like this one — no sugar, no butter specified, spices left to the cook's judgment — assume the reader has made gingerbread many times and needs only the proportions. Church and ladies'-aid cookbooks of this kind were typically assembled from contributions, each cook sending in a favorite over her own name, and Mrs. Thos. Corlett is identified, in the convention of the day, by her husband's name. The terseness is a mark of the genre: these books were memory aids for a community that already cooked alike, not instruction for strangers.