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Soft Ginger Bread
1/2 C butter 1 t cinnamon, ginger & cloves salt 2⅔ t soda in Mrs. Carl Schreck. 1 C boiling water 2½ C flour 2 well beaten eggs, added last Bake in slow oven 1 hour. Serve with bananas and whipped cream. Makes 2 loaves.
Mrs. R. S. Triggs, Mrs. Chas. Laycock, Mrs. C. R. Bulkley.
Note:-Mrs. W. J. Dillon uses 2% C flour. Mrs. Chas. Greenwood uses 1 egg.
This entry has come through in damaged form — the community-cookbook habit of running several contributors' names into one block has scrambled the ingredient list, and at least one line is missing. Read it as a template rather than a complete formula.
- The missing ingredientA soft gingerbread of this type is normally built on molasses. Neither molasses nor sugar appears in the text as printed, and without a sweetener the listed spices, butter, flour, soda and water will not make gingerbread. Anyone working from this page needs a complete formula alongside it.
- Garbled measureMrs. Dillon's "2% C flour" is either 2 1/4 or 2 3/4 cups; the fraction did not survive printing, so it cannot be resolved. The main recipe's 2 1/2 cups is the safer figure to work from.
- The soda and boiling waterThe broken line appears to direct that the soda be dissolved in the cup of boiling water and the liquid poured in hot, which would start the leavening at once and open the crumb. The printed text gives no instruction beyond the order of the ingredients.
- Eggs lastBeaten eggs are folded in after the hot liquid, which means the batter must be cool enough not to scramble them. Let the mixture stand a minute or two before the eggs go in, and beat them in quickly.
- Slow ovenThe book gives no temperatures; a slow oven is conventionally taken as somewhere in the region of 300-325F. An hour at that heat suits two loaves of a wet batter, which scorches on the outside before the centre sets if pushed hotter. Test with a skewer before the hour is up.
- ServingBananas and whipped cream over warm gingerbread is a dessert treatment rather than a breakfast one.
Church and society cookbooks of the early twentieth century printed the same dish several times over, each with its subscriber's name attached, and this page is what happens when an editor tries to consolidate them: three women share the credit, two more are footnoted with their variations, and Mrs. Carl Schreck's name has fallen into the middle of the soda line. The recipe itself is the standard American soft gingerbread, a molasses cake leavened with soda rather than yeast — a form that spread rapidly through nineteenth-century household cookery once saleratus and then commercial baking soda became cheap and reliable. Molasses was the everyday sweetener of the period, far less costly than refined sugar, and its acidity is what makes the soda work. Serving it warm under whipped cream and sliced banana marks the book as a twentieth-century one: bananas had only become an ordinary Midwestern grocery item after the refrigerated banana trade of the early 1900s put them within reach.