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Leavening Agents (C flour t cinnamon t cloves t)
3 C. flour 1 t. cinnamon 1 t. cloves 1 t. ginger 1 t. soda ½ t. salt C. butter 1/2 C. sugar 1 C. molasses 1 C. boiling water 2 well beaten eggs 1. Mix and sift dry ingredients. 2. Mix sugar, butter, molasses and hot water together and add to the dry materials. 3. Add the well beaten eggs last and bake in well greased gem pans or in shallow cake pan in a moderate oven.
Note. This makes a nice pudding if served with a warm vanilla or lemon sauce.
Vanilla Sauce. 1 C. boiling water 2 T. flour 2 T. butter C. sugar 1 t. vanilla 1. Put water on to boil. 2. Mix sugar and flour together and stir into the boiling water. juice. 3. Boil five minutes, stirring constantly. 4.
Remove from the fire and add butter and vanilla.
Note. A sour sauce may be made by adding 1 T. vinegar or lemon Rolled Ginger Bread. 6 C. flour 1 t. soda 1 t. ginger 1 C. molasses 1 C. cream, or 1 C. milk and 6 T. melted butter 1 t. salt 1. Mix and sift dry ingredients. 2. Add the molasses and enough cream to make a soft dough. 3. Turn onto a well floured board and roll 1/2 inch thick. Cut into pieces 2½ inches square and bake on a well greased baking sheet in hot oven.
Two gingerbreads and a pudding sauce, printed in the compressed style of a school manual where fractions were set as superscripts and have dropped out of the text. Read the amounts with that in mind before you start.
- The missing fractionsTwo quantities lost their numerators in printing: "C. butter" in the soft gingerbread and "C. sugar" in the vanilla sauce. (The gingerbread's sugar is printed intact as 1/2 cup.) For a 3-cup-flour molasses gingerbread, 1/2 cup butter is a conventional amount, and 1/2 cup sugar suits the sauce, but the original is genuinely ambiguous here.
- Two teaspoons salt is almost certainly oneTwo teaspoons salt looks high -- with 1 teaspoon soda and 3 cups flour, 2 teaspoons salt may well be a misprint. Use 1/2 to 1 teaspoon and taste the batter.
- Soda and molassesThe soda is the only leavener and it works by reacting with the acid in the molasses, helped along by the cup of boiling water. Use unsulphured molasses rather than blackstrap, which is harsher in flavour, and get the batter into the pan promptly once mixed.
- Oven temperaturesA moderate oven is usually taken as about 350F for the soft gingerbread; a hot oven for the rolled squares as roughly 400 to 425F. The soft batter takes about 20 minutes in gem pans or 30 to 35 in a shallow 9-inch pan; the rolled squares need 8 to 10 minutes and are done when the edges firm.
- Gem pansThese are heavy cast-iron muffin pans, usually of shallow oval or round cups. A standard 12-cup muffin tin stands in for them; grease it well, since molasses batters stick.
- Rolling thicknessThe thickness in the rolled gingerbread is also lost. Roll about 1/4 inch for a crisp square, 1/2 inch for a soft cake-like one. Six cups of flour with only a cup of molasses and a cup of cream makes a stiff dough; add cream by the spoonful until it just holds together.
- The sauceFlour thickened with sugar and no fat will lump if dumped in dry. Whisk the sugar and flour into a little cold water first, then stir that into the boiling water. Five minutes of hard boiling is needed to cook out the raw flour taste; the butter and vanilla go in off the heat so the flavour is not driven off.
- YieldThe soft gingerbread makes about 12 gems or one 9-inch square cake, serving 8 to 9 as pudding with the sauce. The rolled recipe is large and gives roughly three dozen 2 1/2-inch squares.
Molasses gingerbread of this kind was standing furniture in American kitchens through the nineteenth century, and its appearance in a school household-arts manual under the heading of leavening agents fits the lesson: baking soda does nothing on its own, and here the acid comes from the molasses. That the same batter is offered as a cake, as gems, and as a pudding served with sauce suits a manual's economy: one formula, several lessons. Ginger, cinnamon and cloves were by this date relatively cheap imported spices, which may be why the book spends three teaspoons of them without comment.