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Yeast-Raised Gingerbread
4 pounds of good light bread dough. 1 1/2 pounds of dark molasses. 12 ounces of butter or lard. 1 tablespoonful of ground ginger. Little cinnamon, or other spice. Flour to work up to soft dough.
An egg or two does not hurt it. Make up by the coffee cake directions. Dredge granulated sugar over the top when done. Good for supper, hot. Speaking of gingerbread, however, the next, although not made with bread dough, is the best sort yet discovered for hotel suppers. Gingerbread is inclined to be tricky and uncertain, or more properly speaking, sticky and uneatable, if not made with care. Too much molasses or too much soda or powder are usually the faults. This can be made with buttermilk and soda if desired.
A baker's-scale formula written for a hotel kitchen: a risen bread dough is enriched after the fact with molasses, fat and spice, in the manner of a coffee cake. It works, but the molasses fights the yeast, so the second rise is the part that needs patience.
- The hinge: expect a slow second riseMolasses is acidic and sugary enough to stress the yeast, so the dough will likely take noticeably longer to prove after enrichment than it did before. Do not shorten it, and do not reach for soda or powder; too much soda or powder is one of the faults the author names.
- "Coffee cake directions"The directions themselves sit elsewhere in the book; the method they almost certainly describe is working the fat, sweetener, egg and spice into already-risen bread dough until smooth, then panning it, proving it again and baking. A dough hook helps, or expect a sticky ten minutes by hand.
- Weights in cups1 1/2 lb dark molasses is roughly 2 cups; 12 oz butter or lard is 1 1/2 cups. "Flour to work up to soft dough" will be somewhere near 1 to 1 1/2 lb depending on how wet your bread dough was, added a handful at a time until the mass just pulls together.
- Which molasses"dark molasses" here is most likely ordinary cooking molasses rather than blackstrap; blackstrap is markedly more bitter and will throw the flavour off. Unsulphured dark or full-flavour molasses is the closest substitute.
- OvenThe recipe gives no temperature; a moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern reading. In two half-sheet pans figure roughly 30 to 40 minutes; deeper pans run longer and the centre stays gummy if pulled early, so test with a skewer rather than by colour, since molasses browns the top well ahead of the crumb.
- YieldFour pounds of dough plus enrichments and working flour comes to roughly eight pounds or more, enough for about two half-sheet pans and a good many supper portions. Halve or quarter it for a domestic kitchen.
- The final line"This can be made with buttermilk and soda if desired" most likely refers to the chemically leavened gingerbread the author is about to give rather than to the yeasted one above. Either way, do not add soda to this dough.
- ServingCut in squares and dredge with granulated sugar while still warm, as directed. It is a bread-textured gingerbread, chewy rather than cakey, and it stales fast; eat it the day it is baked or split and toast it.
Gingerbread leavened with yeast precedes the household use of chemical leaven: before saleratus and baking powder were household staples, a spiced, molasses-sweetened bread was simply bread dough with the sweetening worked in, which is precisely what this formula does. Commercial bakeshops always had risen dough on hand, and this page suggests how readily a trough of it might be turned into supper gingerbread. The book is a hotel and restaurant manual, and the asides give the trade away: quantities in the four-pound range, the mention of "hotel suppers," and the frank verdict that gingerbread is "sticky and uneatable, if not made with care." Molasses was the cheap sweetener of the American nineteenth century, a byproduct of cane refining that arrived by the barrel and priced well below sugar, which is why so much period baking is brown, damp and spiced rather than white and light.