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Cambridge Gingerbread
1/3 cup butter 2/3 cup boiling water 1 cup molasses 1 egg 2¾ cups flour 1½ teaspoons soda 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon cinnamon 1 teaspoon ginger ¼ teaspoon clove Melt butter in water, add molasses, egg well beaten, and dry ingredients mixed and sifted. Bake in a buttered shallow pan.
A soft, molasses-based gingerbread of the plain sort Fannie Farmer's kitchen turned out by the pan. The method is unusual only in that the fat is melted into boiling water rather than creamed, which gives a wet, pourable batter.
- Oven and panThe original gives neither temperature nor time. Bake at 350F in a buttered 8- or 9-inch square pan, 25 to 35 minutes, until the centre springs back and a tester comes out clean. "Shallow" here means the batter should sit no more than an inch deep; deeper and the middle stays wet while the molasses edges scorch.
- Flour quantityThe printed page was checked: the recipe calls for 2 3/4 cups flour and 1/4 teaspoon clove, as our text now gives. Judge by consistency, which should be thick but pourable.
- CloveThe clove measure has lost its fraction. A quarter teaspoon of ground clove is right for this spice balance; a full teaspoon would overwhelm the ginger.
- Soda, not baking powderThe 1 1/2 teaspoons of soda are there to react with the acid in the molasses, and they also darken the crumb. Do not substitute baking powder, and get the batter into the oven promptly once the dry ingredients go in.
- MolassesUse unsulphured light or dark molasses. Blackstrap is markedly more bitter and will make the cake harsh.
- Temperature of the batterBeat the egg well and add it to the molasses mixture only after the melted butter and boiling water have cooled somewhat, or it will set into threads.
- YieldOne 8-inch square pan, about nine generous squares. Best the day it is baked, though the molasses keeps it moist for two or three days under a cover.
Gingerbread of this kind, dark with molasses and leavened with soda, was one of the cheapest sweet cakes an American household could make: molasses came up the coast from the West Indies trade in quantity and cost a fraction of refined sugar, so it carried nearly every plain cake and cookie in nineteenth-century New England. The Boston Cooking-School book carries several variants side by side, distinguished mostly by fat, liquid and whether eggs are used at all. The Cambridge attribution here is local rather than documentary: the school and its circle sat across the river from Cambridge, and recipe names of this sort are often said to record where a version was collected or taught rather than any older tradition, though that is supposition rather than documented practice.