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Superior Gingerbread
3 cups flour 1½ teaspoons soda 1 teaspoon grated orange peel ½ teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon ginger 1 teaspoon cinnamon Mix ingredients in order given. Beat well and bake in loaf thirty minutes, or in muffin pans twenty minutes. 1 cup molasses 1 cup sour milk 2 cups flour
The ingredient list has come apart in the setting — the spices and leavening are printed first, the wet ingredients last, and flour appears twice. Read it as a plain sour-milk molasses gingerbread and reconcile the quantities before you start.
- The flour is contradictoryThree cups is listed at the top and two cups at the bottom, for one cup of molasses and one cup of sour milk. Two cups of flour to two cups of liquid gives a thin batter; three is closer to a loaf that will hold. The original as printed cannot be followed literally, and no conversion resolves it honestly.
- No fat, no eggMany gingerbreads of the period call for butter and an egg; this one lists neither. Some soft molasses gingerbreads genuinely omitted both, relying on molasses for moisture, but the omission may equally be another casualty of the typesetting. Expect a lean, chewy, slightly dry crumb if you make it as written.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured raw milk, thick and acidic. Buttermilk is the direct stand-in; failing that, a cup of milk with a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar stirred in and left ten minutes.
- Why the sodaA teaspoon and a half of soda is set against the acid of both the molasses and the sour milk. That pairing is the whole leavening system — there is no baking powder and no beaten egg. Get the batter into the pan and the oven promptly, before the gas escapes.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, as was usual. A moderate oven, 350F, suits both the loaf and the muffins. Molasses browns fast, so check the loaf at 30 minutes with a skewer and tent it with foil if the top is darkening ahead of the centre.
- Mix ingredients in order givenTaken at face value this instruction is unusable, since the wet ingredients are printed after the dry. Whisk the flour, soda, salt, spices and orange peel together, then stir in the molasses and sour milk just until combined. "Beat well" is period language for thorough combining, not for developing the batter.
- Grated orange peelZest only, from an unwaxed orange — the white pith is bitter. A teaspoon is roughly the zest of a quarter to a third of a medium orange, and it wants to go into the dry mix so the oils distribute.
- YieldOne standard loaf pan, about 9 by 5 inches, or roughly a dozen muffins. Gingerbread of this kind is better on the second day, wrapped once cool.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and published in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer — one of the many turn-of-the-century cookbooks issued by food firms to put their product into American kitchens, with a full general recipe collection wrapped around the chocolate chapters. A molasses-and-sour-milk gingerbread like this one had nothing to do with chocolate; it was simply the sort of everyday cake every such book was expected to carry. The formula is a New England staple of long standing: molasses was cheaper than sugar and abundant through the West Indies trade, sour milk was what a household had before refrigeration made sweet milk keep, and saleratus or soda reacted with both to raise the loaf. The one flourish is the grated orange peel, a note of citrus in an otherwise plain cake.