Ginger Bread
1/2 cup sugar 1/3 cup molasses 1/2 cup lard 2 eggs 3/4 cup milk 2 cups flour 2 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder 1 scant teaspoon salt 1/2 teaspoon soda 1/2 teaspoon each of ginger, cloves and allspice Mix together eggs, lard, sugar and molasses. Sift together three times baking powder, flour, salt, soda and spices. Add milk. Put together and beat thoroughly. Bake in moderate oven.
A Calumet Baking Powder promotional recipe, typical of the 1900s-1920s: brief, unfussy, and assuming the cook knows her stove. A few details need filling in.
- Oven and time"Moderate oven" in this period corresponds to roughly 350-375F; 350F is a safe modern reading. In a greased 8- or 9-inch square pan expect about 30-35 minutes; a loaf pan will need closer to 45. Test with a skewer in the centre.
- The lardHalf a cup of lard is the original fat and gives a tender, faintly savoury crumb. Unsalted butter or shortening substitutes cup for cup, though butter browns the edges faster.
- Both soda and baking powderThe soda reacts with the acid in the molasses, both neutralising it and generating some lift of its own, while the baking powder supplies the bulk of the rise. Do not drop either one. Calumet was a double-acting powder, and a modern double-acting baking powder is a close enough substitute here.
- MolassesUse unsulphured light or dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is markedly more bitter and less sweet than what this recipe was balanced against.
- Sifting three timesWith period flour and lump-prone powders this mattered. One thorough whisking of the dry ingredients is enough now, but do not skip it entirely -- the soda must be evenly dispersed or you get dark bitter streaks.
- Order of mixingThe placement of "Add milk" is ambiguous; it can be read as going into either the sifted dry mixture or the wet one before the two are combined. Either way, beat only until smooth rather than until the batter is developed.
- SpicingHalf a teaspoon each of ginger, cloves and allspice is restrained by modern taste. A full teaspoon of ginger is closer to what most people now expect from gingerbread.
- YieldAbout nine generous squares. Best warm, and it keeps well wrapped for two or three days as the molasses draws moisture back into the crumb.
This is a manufacturer's recipe. Calumet, founded in Chicago in the late nineteenth century, distributed small booklets of "reliable recipes" in which its baking powder appeared by name in nearly every formula -- a standard marketing method of the period, alongside Royal, Rumford and the rest. What is telling here is the presence of both baking powder and soda: molasses cakes had earlier been raised by a variety of means -- pearlash and yeast before saleratus came into general use around the 1840s, and often sour milk or cream of tartar as the acid partner -- and this recipe can plausibly be read as sitting at the point where the older acid-and-alkali reaction is kept only to tame the molasses while the commercial powder takes over the leavening. The soft, cake-like result is the American line of gingerbread, distinct from the stiff moulded and stamped gingerbreads of Europe, and it owes its texture to eggs, milk and a chemical rise rather than to long keeping.