Gingerbread, Thick
INGREDIENTS for large cake.-1 1/2 lb. of treacle 1/4 lb. of butter, lb. of coarse brown sugar, 1 lb. of flour, 1 oz. of ginger, 1/2 oz. of ground allspice, 1 teaspoonful of carbonate of soda, 1/4 pint of warm milk, 3 eggs. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 2d.
Put the flour into a basin, with the sugar, ginger and allspice; mix these together; warm the butter, and add it, with the treacle, to the other ingredients. Stir well; GINGERBREAD. make the milk just warm, dissolve the carbonate of soda in it, and mix the whole into a nice smooth dough with the eggs, which should be previously well whisked; pour the mixture into a buttered tin, and bake it from 3/4 to 1 hour, or longer, should the gingerbread be very thick. Just before it is done, brush the top over with the yolk of an egg beaten up with a little milk, and put it back in the oven to finish baking.
TIME. to 1 hour.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A large, dark, soft gingerbread of the Victorian type — treacle-heavy, spiced with ginger and allspice, and raised with soda rather than yeast. The original assumes a coal range, so the one thing it never tells you is the oven temperature.
- Oven temperatureBake at 325F (160C). The original gives no oven temperature at all. A cake this rich in treacle scorches on top long before the centre sets, so slow and steady matters more than the stated hour.
- TreacleBritish black treacle is what is meant. Unsulphured molasses is the closest substitute in the US; blackstrap is too bitter and will dominate the spice.
- Carbonate of sodaPlain bicarbonate of soda (baking soda). One teaspoon is correct here because the treacle supplies plenty of acid to react with it — no baking powder is needed.
- The missing sugar quantityThe weight of coarse brown sugar has dropped out of the ingredient line and cannot be recovered from the text. The other quantities (1/4 lb butter, 1 lb each of treacle and flour) point to somewhere between a quarter and a half pound; treat any figure as a guess.
- Coarse brown sugarVictorian "coarse brown" was an unrefined, damp, sticky sugar. Dark muscovado is the nearest modern equivalent; light brown sugar will give a paler, blander cake.
- Warm, not hotThe butter and milk should be barely blood-warm. If the milk is hot when the soda goes in, the gas is spent before the batter reaches the tin, and if the eggs meet hot butter they will scramble.
- Tin and timingThis makes a substantial cake — around 3 lb of batter. A deep 9-inch square or two 2 lb loaf tins, lined as well as buttered, will hold it. Test with a skewer rather than trusting the clock; a thick one may want 15 minutes beyond the hour.
- The egg washBrushing yolk and milk over the top just before the cake is done, as the recipe directs, gives a glossy, slightly lacquered crust. Do it too early and it burns.
- KeepingGingerbread of this kind improves. Wrap it closely once cold and leave it two or three days before cutting; the crumb softens and the spice settles.
Thick gingerbread — as opposed to the thin, snapping fairground kind stamped into shapes — belongs to the tradition of dark treacle cakes that spread through British baking as cheap West Indian molasses became a common grocery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Ginger and allspice were among the cheaper imported spices by Mrs Beeton's day, which helps explain how a cake this heavily spiced could be costed at one shilling and twopence. Carbonate of soda had become commercially available in Britain by the middle of the century, offering an alternative to the older reliance on yeast or long beating, and it suited an acidic treacle batter. The note "seasonable at any time" means simply that nothing in the recipe depends on a season.