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Gingerbread (Tablespoon mixed spices)
1 tablespoon mixed spices 1 tablespoon ginger 1 tablespoon soda 1 tablespoon hot water Flour 1 cup boiling water Cream the lard and sugar; add the other ingredients in the order named, dissolving the soda in the hot water before using. 1 cup sour milk 1 cup sugar 1/2 cup butter 2 cups flour
This page has come apart in typesetting: the ingredient list is split, with part of it printed after the method. Read it as a whole before starting, and note that at least one ingredient named in the instructions never appears in the list at all.
- The list is incompleteThe method says to cream the lard and sugar, but no lard is listed — only 1/2 cup butter. Use the butter as the fat. Gingerbreads of this period commonly include molasses, which this list omits entirely; without it the result bakes paler and milder than a molasses gingerbread.
- Flour is unmeasured twice"Flour" appears once with no quantity and once as "2 cups flour." Two cups is plausible for a single loaf with a cup of sour milk plus a cup of boiling water, but that much liquid will give a thin batter; expect to add flour until it drops thickly from the spoon rather than pours.
- Soda is out of proportionA tablespoon of soda is three teaspoons, well more than a cup of sour milk will neutralise; period guidance runs to roughly half a teaspoon to a teaspoon per cup. Unless molasses is restored, consider reducing to a scant teaspoon, or the crumb may taste soapy.
- Sour milkThis means naturally clabbered raw milk, acidic and slightly thickened. Buttermilk is the direct substitute; failing that, a cup of milk with a tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice stirred in and left ten minutes.
- Mixed spicesUsually some combination of cinnamon, cloves, allspice and nutmeg, sometimes with mace. A tablespoon of it plus a tablespoon of ginger is assertive but in keeping with the style.
- Order of operationsThe printed order is scrambled, so "the order named" cannot be followed literally; the one firm instruction is to dissolve the soda in the hot water before using it. Get the batter into its pan promptly — the leavening starts working the moment the acid milk and soda meet.
- Baking in a fireless cookerBaking -- The recipe gives no baking instruction at all. If the page belongs to the book's fireless-cookery section, it would have been baked in an insulated box between preheated soapstone or iron radiators rather than over a flame; the text itself does not say. In a conventional oven, bake in a greased 9-inch square or loaf pan at 350F for 35 to 45 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean.
- YieldOne 9-inch square pan, about nine to twelve servings. Gingerbread of this kind improves on the second day once wrapped.
Fireless cookery was a serious enthusiasm in American household manuals of the 1900s and 1910s: an insulated wooden or metal chest, sometimes with heated soapstone discs, that let a cook bring food to temperature on the range and then finish it with stored heat while she did something else. It saved fuel in the era of coal and wood stoves and kept the kitchen cool in summer, and manufacturers sold patented cookers alongside home-built versions lined with hay or mineral wool. Baked goods were the hardest case, since a fireless box holds heat but does not brown.