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Sour Milk Gingerbread
1 egg 2 teaspoons ginger 2 teaspoons soda ½ teaspoon salt Mix and sift dry ingredients; add remaining ingredients, beat well, pour into buttered pan, and bake twenty to thirty minutes. 1 cup molasses 2 cups flour 1 teaspoon soda 1 tablespoon ginger
The ingredient list on this page has been scrambled in setting — quantities appear twice, in conflict, and the sour milk of the title is missing from the list entirely. It is workable, but only if you read it as a standard sour-milk gingerbread of the period rather than as a literal set of instructions.
- The list is corruptGinger appears as both 2 teaspoons and 1 tablespoon, and soda as both 2 teaspoons and 1 teaspoon. No amount of sour milk is given at all, though the title requires it. Treat the figures as unreliable and work from a complete version of the formula.
- What the proportions should beA gingerbread built on 1 cup molasses and 2 cups flour would commonly take something like 1 cup sour milk, with 1 teaspoon soda and 1 tablespoon ginger the likelier pairing of the two conflicting sets. The larger soda measure risks a soapy taste and a darker, coarser crumb, though molasses and soured milk both take up some of the alkali.
- Sour milkThis means naturally clabbered raw milk, which is not what modern pasteurised milk does when it sits. Buttermilk is the working equivalent, cup for cup; the acid is what the soda needs to react against.
- MolassesPeriod molasses was a mid-grade cane syrup, closer to today's dark or full-flavour molasses than to blackstrap. Blackstrap is bitter and much less sweet and will throw the cake off.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, and the page uses no oven term at all. As a modern working figure, 350F suits a gingerbread of this depth. Molasses browns fast, so check the edges before the twenty-minute mark.
- PanTwenty to thirty minutes implies a shallow pan rather than a loaf; an 8- or 9-inch square pan, buttered, gives about the right depth. Baked in a loaf tin it will need considerably longer and is more likely to sink in the centre.
- Mixing"Beat well" here predates any concern about gluten, and gingerbread batters are forgiving, but stop as soon as the batter is smooth. The soda begins working against the sour milk immediately, so get it into the oven without delay.
- YieldAn 8-inch square gives nine generous squares, eaten warm with butter.
Lowney's Cook Book was published in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and compiled by Maria Willett Howard — one of a long line of cookbooks issued by food firms to put their product in front of home cooks, with a full complement of ordinary household recipes wrapped around the chocolate ones. Sour milk gingerbread belongs to that ordinary majority. Before reliable refrigeration, milk that had turned was a usable resource rather than waste, and the pairing of soured milk with saleratus or soda was a common American leavening before baking powder became cheap and universal; the acid in the milk and the alkali in the soda produce the gas that lifts the cake. Molasses gingerbread in particular was a New England fixture, cheap, keeping well, and dark enough that the coarse crumb of a soda-raised batter went unremarked. The garbled ingredient list on this page is a reminder that these books were set by hand from working manuscripts.