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Sponge Gingerbread
Sometimes called black cake and spice cake. 1 pound of molasses. 6 ounces of sugar. 8 ounces of butter, melted. 1 pint of milk. 6 eggs. 1 ounce of ginger. 2 teaspoonfuls of baking powder. 2 pounds of flour.
Melt the butter in the milk made warm, and pour them into the molasses and sugar, mix, add eggs, ginger, powder, flour. Beat up well.
A commercial-scale batter from a trade manual: it makes roughly 5 pounds of gingerbread, enough for two half-sheet pans. The original gives no pan, no oven and no time, so those are the gaps to fill first.
- Scale and panTwo pounds of flour plus a pint of milk makes a large quantity of batter, on the order of 10 cups. Divide between two greased and papered 9x13 pans, or halve the whole recipe for a single one.
- Oven and timeBake at 350F. A 9x13 pan filled about an inch deep needs 35 to 45 minutes; the surface will crack slightly and spring back when pressed.
- Weighing the molassesA pound of molasses is roughly 1 1/3 cups, not a pint. Weigh it if you can — measuring sticky syrup by volume runs high.
- Two pounds of flourAbout 7 cups of modern all-purpose flour by the scoop, but flour was measured by weight in a bakeshop for good reason. Use the scale.
- An ounce of gingerThat is 4 to 5 tablespoons of ground ginger. Nineteenth-century ground spice was often stale and weak by the time it reached the bakeshop; with fresh supermarket ginger, 2 tablespoons gives a strongly spiced cake and 3 is assertive.
- LeaveningTwo teaspoons of baking powder is light for this much flour. The molasses is acidic, and period bakers relied on it reacting with soda; a teaspoon of baking soda alongside the powder gives the lift the name promises and darkens the crumb.
- Egg sizeEgg size was not standardised, and period eggs may have run a little smaller than today's large. If you want to err on the light side, five large eggs will do.
- Temperature of the mixtureWarm the milk only enough to melt the butter. If it goes into the eggs hot, they will set in threads.
- StorageMolasses cakes improve after a day wrapped tightly. Cut from the pan rather than turning out — the crumb is tender while warm.
"Sponge gingerbread" in American bakeshop usage meant the soft, cake-like kind, raised with a chemical leavener and poured as a batter, as opposed to the stiff rolled-and-cut gingerbread that was baked as hard cakes or figures. The alternate names the book offers — black cake, spice cake — suggest how loosely these categories were policed. Molasses did the work sugar does now: it was the cheap sweetener, a by-product of cane refining that arrived in barrels, which is why the recipe weighs it rather than measuring it. The proportion here, a pound of molasses to six ounces of sugar, suggests the flavour was meant to be frankly dark, not the mild spiced sweetness of a modern gingerbread.