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Soft Molasses Gingerbread
1/4 cup fat 1 cup molasses 1 tablespoon vinegar 1 egg 1 teaspoon soda 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon ginger 1 cup sour milk 2 cups flour Melt the fat, add the molasses, vinegar, and beaten egg. Mix and sift the dry ingredients and add alternately with the milk. Pour into a greased pan and bake twenty-five minutes in a moderate oven (360 degrees-380 degrees F.). Batter should be just thin enough so that the track left by the spoon in stirring disappears at once.
A thin-batter gingerbread of the sheet-cake type, leavened by soda reacting with sour milk, vinegar and molasses. The batter consistency note at the end is the real instruction: get that right and the rest follows.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe helpfully gives its own numbers: 360-380F. Set a modern oven to 375F and start checking at 20 minutes; a 9-inch square pan will take 25-30.
- Sour milkThis meant milk left to sour naturally, which is not what you can buy today. Use buttermilk, or stir 1 tablespoon lemon juice or vinegar into 1 cup whole milk and let it stand 10 minutes. The acid is structural here, not a flavour note -- it is what the soda reacts with.
- The fat"Fat" here would most likely have meant whatever the house had: lard, shortening or drippings. Melted butter works; keep it to a scant 1/4 cup so the batter does not thin further.
- MolassesUse unsulphured light or dark molasses rather than blackstrap, which is markedly more bitter than the molasses ordinarily sold at the time. Molasses makes up a large share of the liquid, so the choice dominates the flavour.
- Leavening balanceOne teaspoon of soda against a cup of molasses, a cup of sour milk and a tablespoon of vinegar is a lot of acid for the soda to meet. The cake will rise, but it stays moist and slightly dense rather than fluffy -- that is the intended texture of soft gingerbread.
- GingerA full tablespoon of ground ginger reads as a great deal by modern standards and is not a misprint; soft molasses gingerbread was meant to be sharply spiced. Ground ginger loses potency fast, so an old jar will give a much milder cake than the recipe intends.
- Pan and yieldNo pan size is given. A greased 9-inch square pan gives about the right depth for twenty-five minutes; a loaf pan will be deeper and need appreciably longer at a lower heat. Cuts into 12 to 16 squares.
- The batter testThe spoon track should close over immediately. If it holds even briefly, add a spoonful or two of the sour milk -- too stiff a batter here bakes dry and tough.
Soft molasses gingerbread was an everyday American cake of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth: cheap, keepable, and dependent on two things most households had, molasses and milk gone sour. Before commercial baking powder was widespread, cooks relied on this pairing of an acid with saleratus or soda, and recipes of this type carried on through the transition largely unchanged. The Delineator was a Butterick magazine, best known for fashion and patterns, that also carried cookery, and its recipes lean toward plain, reliable home baking; giving an oven range in degrees is consistent with a period when thermostat-equipped ranges were becoming common and "a moderate oven" could be given a number.