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Sugar Ginger Bread
2 eggs 3 level teaspoons Calumet Bak- 1 cup sugar ing Powder 1⅜ cups flour 1½ teaspoons ginger 1/2 teaspoon salt 3/8 cup thin cream Beat eggs until light, add gradually sugar. Sift together thoroughly flour, salt, baking powder and ginger and add to the first mixture with cream, Bake in flat buttered cake pan about 30 minutes.
ALUME
A promotional-booklet formula, printed in two columns and scrambled by the scanner. Read it as: 2 eggs, 1 cup sugar, 1 3/8 cups flour, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 3 level teaspoons baking powder, 1 1/2 teaspoons ginger, 3/8 cup thin cream. The stray "ALUME" at the end is the tail of the Calumet trademark.
- No oven temperatureThe recipe gives none. A moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern reading. Thirty minutes in a buttered flat pan (an 8-inch square works) is about right; the cake is done when the centre springs back and a tester comes out clean.
- Thin creamLight cream, 18 to 20 percent butterfat. Half-and-half is the closest supermarket equivalent. This is the only fat in the cake apart from what greases the pan, so do not substitute milk unless you accept a drier, leaner crumb.
- 3/8 cupSix tablespoons.
- The baking powder is highThree teaspoons to 1 3/8 cups of flour is roughly double the modern ratio, which is unsurprising in a leaflet published to sell baking powder. Two teaspoons will lift this batter perfectly well and will not leave the faint metallic edge that a heavy hand with a phosphate-aluminium powder can give.
- Beat the eggs properlyThis is a sponge-type batter with no creamed butter, so all the structure comes from the eggs. Beat them until pale and thick, then add the sugar in a slow stream and keep beating until the mixture falls in ribbons. Fold the dry ingredients and cream in at the end rather than stirring hard.
- Ground gingerGround spice loses most of its punch within a year of opening. If your jar is old, use two teaspoons; the recipe has no molasses or brown sugar to carry it.
- YieldAn 8-inch square pan is a fair reading of "flat cake pan," cut into nine or twelve squares. Best the day it is baked, since a low-fat crumb stales quickly.
Reliable Recipes was published by the Calumet Baking Powder Company of Chicago as advertising, and the recipes serve to keep the brand in front of the reader. Sugar gingerbread is the pale cousin of the dark molasses gingerbread most people picture: it is sweetened with white sugar only, so the ginger tastes sharp and clean rather than smoky, and the cake bakes to a light gold. American cookbooks kept the two kinds distinct through the nineteenth century, molasses gingerbread being the cheaper, keeping, everyday sort and sugar gingerbread the refined tea-table version, since white sugar cost more. Recipes like this one, quick to mix and leavened entirely with chemical powder, were exactly what the baking powder companies wanted in circulation, since they showed off a product that could raise a cake with no yeast, no long beating and no saleratus-and-sour-milk arithmetic.