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Orange Gingerbread
12 ounces flour 4 ounces brown sugar 1 teaspoon ginger Molasses 1 teaspoon allspice 2 ounces candied orange peel 4 ounces butter Sift the flour; stir in the spices and chopped orange peel; warm the butter and add it; then mix all to a dough with molasses. Roll very thin, using as little flour as possible; cut in small round cakes and bake in a quick oven.
A thin, snapping ginger biscuit rather than a soft cake, built on weights and an unmeasured quantity of molasses. Two things need settling before you start: how much molasses, and how hot the oven really needs to be.
- The molasses is the missing measureNo quantity is given, so the dough has to be brought together by feel. Add molasses a few tablespoons at a time until the crumbs cohere into a stiff, workable paste; in modern trials something in the region of 1/2 to 3/4 cup suits this quantity of flour. Stop while the dough is still firm; too much and it will not roll thin without sticking.
- Weights to volume12 ounces flour is about 2 3/4 cups, 4 ounces brown sugar about 1/2 cup packed, 4 ounces butter is one stick. The 2 ounces of candied peel is roughly 1/3 cup once chopped fine.
- "A quick oven"Usually reckoned at roughly 400-425F, though the term was never fixed. At that heat, biscuits rolled as thin as this recipe demands will be done in a few minutes and will scorch soon after — molasses and brown sugar both darken fast. Bake one tray as a test; 375-400F gives a wider margin if your oven runs hot.
- Warm, not melted, butter"Warm the butter" means soften it to the point where it will rub into the flour, not liquefy it. Melted butter makes a greasy dough that spreads and toughens.
- Rolling thin with little flourThe instruction to use as little flour as possible is the hinge — extra bench flour makes these dry and dusty. Roll between sheets of parchment instead, and chill the dough for half an hour if it fights you.
- Candied orange peelChop it as fine as you can; large pieces sit proud of a thin biscuit and burn. Good candied peel bought whole in strips is far better here than the diced supermarket mixed peel, which is often citron-heavy and dry.
- SpicingA teaspoon each of ginger and allspice across 12 ounces of flour is mild by modern taste. If you want the ginger to read clearly against the molasses, double it.
- YieldSeveral dozen small rounds cut at 2 inches; rolled as thin as the recipe directs the count can run well past four dozen. They crisp as they cool and keep for a couple of weeks in a tin.
Gingerbread in English and American kitchens has always covered two quite different things: the soft molasses loaf, and the thin, hard spiced biscuit stamped or cut into shapes, which is generally taken to be the older form. This is the second kind, worked to a stiff paste and rolled wafer-thin, a technique that runs back through fairground gingerbread and the printed gingerbread moulds of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The orange peel is what marks it as a household cake rather than a plain one; candied citrus was a store-cupboard luxury, and adding it to gingerbread was a way of dressing up a cheap dough. Molasses, rather than sugar, remained the standard sweetener for American gingerbread well into the twentieth century, a legacy of the cane trade. Mrs. Fryer's book, issued in loose-leaf form, belongs to the era of the systematised domestic-science kitchen — though this particular recipe, with its unweighed molasses and its "quick oven," still speaks the older language of judgement by hand and eye.