Home › Cakes › Crisp Gingerbread
Crisp Gingerbread
1 pound flour 2/3 cup sugar 2/3 cup butter 1 tablespoon ginger 1 teaspoon cloves 1¼ teaspoon mace Grated rind of 1 lemon Molasses Cut and rub the butter into the flour and sugar until thoroughly mixed; add spices and lemon peel; mix thoroughly and moisten with molasses. Roll the dough very thin; cut into squares and bake in a hot oven.
CRULLERS (New England Doughnuts) 1 egg 1 cup sugar Cassia or nutmeg 1/4 teaspoons soda 1 teaspoon butter Flour 1 cup sour milk Beat the egg; add the sugar, flavoring to taste, butter, melted, and flour and milk alternately. Dissolve the soda in the milk, and mix all as lightly as possible. Use flour enough to make a soft dough; roll and fry in deep fat, hot enough to smoke but not too hot, or the crullers will brown and not be cooked through. Sweet milk and two tablespoons baking powder may be substituted for the sour milk and soda. 2 cups sugar 1 cup butter
A rolled, cut and baked gingerbread snap rather than a soft cake — closer to a spice shortbread stiffened with molasses. The dough is deliberately dry, and the whole character of the thing depends on rolling it thin.
- Molasses is the only liquidThere is no egg, milk or water here, so the molasses does all the moistening. Add it a spoonful at a time and stop as soon as the crumbs come together into a stiff, workable dough — roughly 1/2 to 3/4 cup for a pound of flour, depending on your flour and how warm the butter is.
- "A hot oven"For thin cut biscuits of this kind, 400F is the practical reading. They colour fast at the edges; 7 to 10 minutes is usually enough, and they crisp further as they cool.
- Roll very thinThis is the hinge. At 1/8 inch or less the squares bake dry and snap; any thicker and you get a hard, chewy biscuit instead of a crisp one. Roll between sheets of paper if the dough cracks.
- A pound of flourAbout 3 1/2 to 4 cups, or 450 g. Weighing is worth it here, since the dough has so little liquid that a heavy cup of flour throws the balance off noticeably.
- Ground spice quantitiesA full tablespoon of ginger with a teaspoon of cloves is assertive by current standards. Halving the cloves is reasonable if you want the ginger to lead.
- MaceThe lacy outer covering of the nutmeg, sold ground; nutmeg at the same quantity is the usual substitute, though it is a shade warmer and less floral.
- Butter and saltButter of the period was often salted, and the recipe adds no salt of its own. If you use unsalted, add about 1/2 teaspoon of salt with the flour or the spices will taste flat.
- YieldA pound of flour rolled thin gives something on the order of five to six dozen small squares. They keep for weeks in a tin and are better on the second day.
Crisp gingerbreads of this sort — flour, sugar, butter, spice and treacle or molasses, rolled and cut — belong to the older branch of the gingerbread family, related to the hard spiced cakes long associated with English fairs and pressed into carved moulds. Softer, cakier gingerbreads became much more common once saleratus and then baking powder were in general use in the nineteenth century, though leavened and cake-like versions existed earlier with yeast or eggs. Molasses was the cheaper sweetener in many American kitchens, and a spice list running to ginger, cloves, mace and lemon peel suggests a well-stocked spice box. Recipes like this one, giving flour by the pound and molasses by no measure at all, assume a cook who knows what the dough should feel like under the hand.