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Hard Gingerbread
2½ cups sugar 6 eggs 8 cups flour 1 teaspoon soda 1/4 cup milk 3 teaspoons ginger Cream butter; add remaining ingredients. Spread quarter inch thick on buttered inverted dripping pan. Roll with creased rolling pin. Bake in quick oven. Cut in squares. Cool and keep in air-tight receptacles.
A dry, biscuit-like gingerbread rolled thin and stamped, closer to a keeping cookie than to the soft molasses cake the name now suggests. The ingredient list has a gap that has to be filled before you start.
- The missing butterThe method opens "Cream butter" but no quantity appears in the list. For a batch built on 8 cups of flour, roughly 1 to 1½ cups (2 to 3 sticks) would be in keeping with hard gingerbreads of this type; start at 1 cup for a crisper, drier snap.
- Scale downEight cups of flour with 2½ cups sugar and six eggs yields something over three pounds of dough and several dozen squares. Quartering the recipe gives a manageable sheet and is easier on a single mixing bowl.
- A quick ovenRoughly 400-450F. At a quarter inch thick the sheet colors fast, so check early; the squares should be set and browned at the edges but not dark, since they harden further as they cool.
- Inverted dripping panA dripping pan is the shallow roasting pan that sat under a spit or joint. Turning it over gave a flat, rimless surface to roll dough on and slide it off. A modern rimless baking sheet, or the back of a half-sheet pan, does the same job.
- Creased rolling pinA wooden pin cut with grooves or a pattern, rolled over the sheet to emboss it before baking. A plain pin is fine; score lines with the back of a knife if you want the ridged look.
- Soda without acidA teaspoon of soda in ¼ cup milk has almost nothing to react with here, since there is no molasses, sour milk or buttermilk. Expect very little lift, which is the point in a hard gingerbread. Do not substitute baking powder and expect the same texture.
- The dough will be stiffWith that flour-to-liquid ratio it works more like a shortbread or springerle dough than a batter. Press and roll it out rather than trying to spread it; chill briefly if it fights back.
- Cutting and keepingScore into squares while the sheet is still warm and break them apart once cool, or the biscuits shatter. Stored airtight they keep for weeks, as the recipe's closing instruction assumes.
Lowney's Cook Book was published in 1907 by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and it carried a full general repertoire alongside the chocolate recipes that justified its existence. Hard gingerbread belongs to a much older line than the soft molasses cake that took over the name in American kitchens: a stiff, thin, long-keeping spice biscuit of the sort sold at English fairs and markets, where patterned rolling pins and carved boards were used to stamp the surface before baking. Its virtue was durability, which is why the instruction ends not with serving but with storage in airtight tins.