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New York Gingerbread
cup butter 1½ cups flour 5 eggs 1½ cups powdered sugar 1 tablespoon yellow ginger 1 teaspoon baking powder 1 teaspoon salt Cream butter; add flour. Add remaining ingredients and beat ten minutes. Bake in buttered bread pan fortyfive to sixty minutes. 1 cup egg whites 1 teaspoon salt
A pale ginger cake rather than the dark molasses gingerbread most readers expect, and the text as printed has lost some of its punctuation and picked up a stray line. Read it as a butter cake leavened largely by long beating.
- The butter quantity is missingThe line begins "cup butter" with no number in front of it, so the amount is genuinely lost. Against 1½ cups flour and 1½ cups sugar, anything from ½ to 1 cup would be plausible; the original figure cannot be recovered.
- The last line is not part of this recipe"1 cup egg whites 1 teaspoon salt" is the ingredient header of the following recipe, almost certainly an angel or white cake, that has run on during transcription. Ignore it here.
- Powdered sugarIn American cookbooks of this era "powdered sugar" means finely granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-laden confectioners' sugar sold under that name today. Use superfine or ordinary granulated.
- Yellow gingerRead it as ordinary dried ground ginger. The reason for the "yellow" is not certain; it may distinguish it from the peeled or bleached "white" ginger also sold at the time. A full tablespoon is a strong dose and is the point of the cake.
- That teaspoon of saltA teaspoon reads as high for a cake of this size; half a teaspoon may suit modern palates better.
- Beat ten minutesWith five eggs and only a teaspoon of baking powder, the aeration from beating is doing most of the lifting. Ten minutes assumes a hand and a wooden spoon; a few minutes on medium-high in a stand mixer should reach a comparable point.
- Pan and ovenA "bread pan" is a loaf pan, roughly 9 by 5 inches, buttered and preferably lined on the bottom. No oven temperature is given; around 350F is a reasonable modern working figure -- check at 45 minutes with a skewer.
- YieldOne loaf, about ten slices. It does not keep as well as a molasses gingerbread; the crumb dries after a couple of days, so wrap it well.
Not all gingerbread was dark. Alongside the molasses-and-soda kind, nineteenth-century American cookbooks carried pale "white" or "sponge" gingerbreads built on butter, sugar, eggs and a heavy hand with ground ginger, closer to a pound cake than to the chewy black loaves of New England. Regional labels like "New York" attached themselves loosely to such recipes and rarely indicate any documented origin; they functioned as shorthand for a style considered more refined than country gingerbread, in the same way "Boston" or "Federal" turn up on other cakes of the period. This one is credited to a book issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate firm, whose cookbook covered the whole domestic repertoire rather than sticking to cocoa. The tablespoon of ginger is a reminder of how cheap and ubiquitous the spice had become by the early twentieth century.