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Hot Water Gingerbread
2 to 4 tablespoons butter or beef suet cup boiling water ½ teaspoon salt teaspoon cinnamon Mix and sift dry ingredients; add remaining ingredients. Bake twenty to thirty minutes. 1 cup molasses to cup butter, suet, or chicken fat
The text as printed has lost several of its quantities in transcription — there is no flour, soda, or ginger figure, and the water measure reads only "cup." Treat it as a skeleton of the standard hot-water gingerbread rather than a complete formula, and read the notes below before scaling anything.
- What is missingA hot-water gingerbread of this period runs roughly 1 cup molasses, 1 cup boiling water, 2 1/2 cups flour, 1 teaspoon soda and 1 to 2 teaspoons ginger. The printed page gives none of the flour, soda or ginger amounts, so the recipe cannot be followed literally.
- The fat"Beef suet" and "chicken fat" were ordinary baking fats in a household that rendered its own. Butter behaves closest to modern expectations; rendered beef suet gives a firmer, slightly waxy crumb and a distinctly savoury edge.
- Boiling water is the methodBoiling water melts the fat and thins the molasses, which is what makes the batter pourable. The page as printed says only to mix and sift the dry ingredients and add the rest, so the order of combining is not actually spelled out here.
- Molasses and sodaThe leavening here depends on the acid in the molasses reacting with baking soda. Modern unsulphured molasses is often said to be less acidic than the sulphured barrel molasses of the period, though the difference is not well documented; blackstrap is more bitter than intended.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Twenty to thirty minutes would suit a moderate oven, around 350F by modern reckoning. The recipe as printed names neither a temperature nor a pan.
- DonenessMolasses batters brown early and darkly, so colour tells you nothing. Go by a tester coming out clean and the centre springing back.
- YieldBaked in an 8- or 9-inch pan it would cut into nine or twelve squares, though the recipe as printed gives neither pan size nor yield. Served warm, plain or with whipped cream.
Hot-water gingerbread was the cheap, quick end of a very old family of cakes: molasses and ginger instead of sugar and eggs, mixed in one bowl and baked in a shallow pan. Molasses was the standard American sweetener well into the nineteenth century, arriving by the barrel from the Caribbean and costing a fraction of refined sugar, which helps explain why gingerbread and its relatives turn up so often among the plain cakes of period cookbooks. The appearance of beef suet and chicken fat as alternatives to butter is the tell-tale mark of a frugal kitchen that rendered every scrap of fat it had. This book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and alongside its chocolate recipes it carries a full complement of ordinary household baking, a suet gingerbread among them.