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Soft Ginger Bread
1/2 cup butter. 1 cup molasses. 1/2 cup sugar. 2 1/2 cups flour. 1/2 cup milk. 2 eggs. 1 level teaspoon baking powder. 1 level teaspoon ginger. 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon.
Make and bake as cake, serve hot with sauce.
A one-line recipe that assumes you already know how to build a butter cake. The method is the standard creaming sequence, and the leavening is the one thing worth thinking about before you start.
- "Make and bake as cake"Cream the butter with the sugar, beat in the eggs, then add the molasses. Add the sifted dry ingredients alternately with the milk, in two or three additions, mixing only until smooth.
- Oven and panNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern default. In an 8-inch square pan, greased and floured, expect roughly 30 to 35 minutes; a loaf pan will take longer. It is done when the centre springs back and a tester comes out clean.
- The leavening is thinOne level teaspoon of baking powder for 2 1/2 cups of flour is below modern practice, which runs to about a teaspoon per cup. A cup of molasses is acidic, and some period gingerbread recipes use saleratus (baking soda) with it instead of, or alongside, baking powder. Expect a fairly dense, close-grained cake rather than a light one.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cooking molasses, not blackstrap, which is far more bitter than what Wilson's readers bought. Grease the measuring cup or measure it after the butter so it releases cleanly.
- Ground gingerA teaspoon of ginger and half of cinnamon is restrained by current taste. Ground spices lose potency in the jar within a year, so if yours are older, the cake will read as plain molasses cake.
- "Serve hot with sauce"The recipe does not say which. Likely candidates are a hard sauce (creamed butter and powdered sugar, sometimes with a spirit), a lemon sauce thickened with cornstarch, or simply whipped cream.
- YieldBaked in an 8-inch square pan, it cuts into nine generous squares or twelve smaller ones.
Mary A. Wilson wrote household and cookery columns for the Ladies' Home Journal and the Philadelphia press around the First World War, and her 1920 cook book collects that work; her reputation rested on wartime substitution and thrift, which may be why molasses does most of the sweetening here while sugar is held to half a cup. "Soft" gingerbread is the American distinction from the hard, rolled, cut gingerbread of the biscuit tin, and by the nineteenth century it commonly meant a molasses-based cake baked in a shallow pan and cut in squares. Serving it hot with a sauce was usual for the family of baked and steamed molasses puddings and gingerbreads.