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Gingerbread (Cup molasses cups flour cup)
1 cup molasses 3 cups flour 1 cup sugar 1/2 cup butter and lard 2 eggs 1 cup sour milk 2 even teaspoons soda 2 teaspoons cinnamon 1½ teaspoons ginger 1 teaspoon cloves 1/4 teaspoon grated nutmeg Beat the butter and sugar to a cream; add the eggs, then the milk with the soda dissolved in it, last the molasses, spices and flour. Bake in square tins about twenty minutes.
A plain, generously spiced molasses cake in the American sheet-cake tradition. The original gives no oven temperature, which is the one thing a modern cook has to supply.
- Oven temperatureBake at 350F. Twenty minutes is right for a thin sheet in an 8-inch square pan; a deeper pan will want 30 to 35 minutes. Test with a skewer at the centre rather than trusting the clock.
- "Square tins"Two 8-inch square pans, or one 9x13. The batter is thin enough to spread itself; grease and line the base, since molasses cakes stick.
- Sour milkNot spoiled milk but naturally soured raw milk, roughly the acidity of buttermilk. Use cultured buttermilk, or 1 cup of whole milk with 1 tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar stirred in and left 10 minutes.
- Two teaspoons of sodaThat is a lot by modern standards, but it is balanced by both the sour milk and the molasses, which are acidic. Level the spoons as the recipe says, and don't add baking powder on top of it or the crumb will taste soapy and sink.
- Butter and lardHalf a cup total, split between the two. Lard gives a shorter, more tender crumb; all butter works and many cooks will prefer the flavour. All shortening will read as flat.
- MolassesUse ordinary unsulphured molasses, not blackstrap, which is far more bitter than what the book intends and will fight the spice.
- Mixing orderFollow it as written: the soda goes into the milk, not into the flour. The batter will look curdled and loose once the molasses is in, which is normal. Stop stirring as soon as the flour disappears.
- YieldAbout 16 squares per 8-inch pan, so roughly 32 from the full batch, or a comparable number from a 9x13. It keeps well; wrapped, the flavour is rounder on the second day.
Gingerbread of this kind is a cake rather than a biscuit, leavened chemically and sweetened mostly with molasses, and it was one of the cheapest respectable cakes an American household could put on the table. Molasses was the everyday sweetener for much of the nineteenth century, cheaper than refined sugar and shipped in quantity from the Caribbean, while the soda-and-sour-milk pairing let a cook raise a cake without yeast or long beating. The heavy hand with cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg alongside the ginger is typical of the period; "gingerbread" named the style more than the dominant spice.