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Fairy Gingerbread
No eggs needed. 1 cup butter-7 oz. 2 cups light brown sugar-13 oz. 1 cup milk-1/2 pint. 4 cups flour-1 pound. 1 teaspoonful ground ginger. Warm the butter and sugar slightly and rub them together to a cream. Add the milk, ginger and flour. It makes a paste like very thick cream. Spread a thin coating of butter on the baking pans, let it get quite cold and set, then spread the paste on it no thicker than a visiting card, barely covering the pan from sight. Bake in a slack oven, and when done cut the sheets immediately into the shape and size of common cards. "Old Fashioned" Gingerbread. 1 1/2 pounds of molasses. 8 ounces of butter or lard. 3 eggs. 1 ounce of ground ginger. 1 teaspoonful of soda, large. 2 pounds of flour. 1 pint of hot water. Salt when lard is used.
Melt the butter and stir it into the molasses and then the eggs, ginger and soda.
The mixture begins to foam up. Then stir in the flour, and lastly the hot water, a little at a time Bake in a shallow pan.
The three varieties preceding do well as small cakes, baked in patty pans or gem pans. The next, besides doing for sheet gingerbread, can also be made into the plainest ginger cookies. Need brushing over with milk to look well. Sugar or comfits may be dredged on top.
Soft Gingerbread without Eggs. 1 pound of molasses. 6 ounces of sugar. 1 pint of milk. 8 ounces of butter. 1 tablespoonful of ground ginger. 1 teaspoonful soda and same of baking powder. 4 pounds of flour.
Warm the butter with the sugar and molasses and beat up about 5 minutes. Mix in the soda and all the rest of ingredients.
It makes dough that can be rolled out and baked on pans. However, it is easy enough to make ginger cakes. But the baking of them--"aye, there's the rub!" There are cooks who, while the range is hot, cooking supper, can bake gingerbread of a nice light color without burn, gall, or bitterness, but--
Four gingerbreads in sequence, running from a wafer thin enough to see through to a stiff rolled dough. The weights are the reliable part; the cup equivalents the author supplies are period ones and not always what a modern cup holds.
- The hinge: thickness and speedFairy gingerbread only works if the paste is spread as thin as the recipe insists, the thickness of a visiting card, and cut the instant it leaves the oven. Cooled sheets tend to shatter rather than cut, and a patch spread thicker than the rest will stay soft.
- Slack ovenA slack oven is a cool one, usually glossed at somewhere around 250-300F. Watch the wafers rather than the clock; they crisp as they cool, so pulling them while they still look slightly underdone is the safer error.
- The buttered, chilled panButtering the pan and letting the butter set hard is not fussiness. Cold set butter gives the very thin batter something to grip so it can be spread with an offset spatula instead of sliding into ridges. A silicone mat or parchment does the same job more reliably.
- Weights over cupsThe author's own equivalents are the ones to follow: 1 cup butter = 7 oz, 2 cups light brown sugar = 13 oz, 4 cups flour = 1 lb. That flour figure is about 4 oz per cup, lighter than the 4.25-5 oz a modern cup of all-purpose flour weighs. Scale the weights and ignore the cups.
- Molasses by weightMolasses is given in pounds throughout. One pound is about 1 1/3 cups; 1 1/2 pounds is about 2 cups. Use unsulphured baking molasses rather than blackstrap, which is far more bitter than what these recipes assume.
- That ounce of gingerThat ounce of ground ginger -- An ounce of ground ginger is roughly five tablespoons, a heavy but not impossible dose against two pounds of flour. With fresh, strongly flavoured spice you may want to begin with less.
- Soda and molassesThe foaming the author describes is the soda reacting with the acid in the molasses, and it starts immediately. Mix the flour in and get these into the oven without delay; a batter left standing loses its lift.
- YieldThe fairy gingerbread quantity is a large batch — close to three pounds of paste, enough for several sheet pans and a great many wafers. Halving or quartering it works without adjustment.
Fairy gingerbread belongs to a small family of American wafer cookies — the name is generally traced to its near weightlessness rather than to any particular place, and versions of it circulated in New England cookery writing and cooking-school teaching in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. What sets it apart from the sturdier gingerbreads printed alongside it is the absence of both egg and leavening: it rises not at all, and depends entirely on being spread thin and baked slow, which is why it reads more like a confectioner's tuile than a household cake. The closing complaint about baking gingerbread on a range busy with supper is a fair reminder that wood and coal ranges gave a cook no dial, only judgment, and that the line between properly baked ginger and the acrid bitterness of scorched molasses was a matter of skill.