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Ginger Bread
3/4 cup butter melted. 1 1/2 cups sugar. 3/4 cup milk. 5 cups flour. 2 teaspoons baking powder. 1 teaspoon salt. 1 full teaspoon ginger. Roll thin in sheets and mark with a grooved roller; sprinkle with sugar and bake in moderate oven.
This is a rolled, crisp gingerbread in the older sense — a stiff sheet dough cut into biscuits, not the dark molasses cake the name suggests today. The dough is deliberately dry, and that is the whole character of it.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350 to 375F. Rolled thin, the sheets should be done in about 8 to 12 minutes; pull them when the edges take colour, as they crisp further on cooling.
- The dough will feel too dryFive cups of flour against 3/4 cup milk and 3/4 cup melted butter gives a very stiff, almost sandy dough. Work it together with the hands rather than a spoon, and let it rest ten minutes before rolling so the flour hydrates. Add milk a teaspoon at a time only if it will not hold together at all.
- No molasses, no eggThis is a pale ginger biscuit rather than a dark cake. Do not substitute in molasses expecting the modern flavour — it would throw off both the liquid balance and the leavening.
- The grooved rollerA grooved or ribbed rolling pin was used to mark sheet doughs into portions before baking. A lattice pastry roller, or scoring lines with a knife, does the same job: it marks the sheet so it can be broken cleanly after baking.
- Roll thin means thinAbout 1/8 inch. Thicker than that and the low proportion of liquid makes the result hard rather than crisp.
- Sugar on topSprinkle while the dough is still damp from rolling, then press it in lightly with the roller so it does not shower off in the oven. Coarse sugar holds better than fine.
- Cutting and yieldBake the marked sheet whole and break it along the grooves, or cut squares before baking. Expect roughly five to six dozen small biscuits from the full quantity — it is a large batch by modern standards.
- KeepingStored airtight, these improve for a day or two and keep for weeks; that durability was the point of a hard ginger biscuit.
Mrs. Wilson's cook book appears to grow out of her years writing on household food economy for American magazines during and just after the First World War, and the recipe is consistent with that background: no eggs, a large yield, and a biscuit that keeps. The word "gingerbread" long covered both soft cakes and hard rolled sheets, and the hard kind -- sometimes called ginger nuts, ginger snaps, or simply gingerbread cakes -- was the older form, sold at fairs and commonly marked or printed before baking. Ginger was among the cheaper imported spices in the English-speaking kitchen by the eighteenth century.