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Card Gingerbread
1¾ cups flour ½ tablespoon ginger ¾ teaspoon salt ½ teaspoon soda ¼ teaspoon cinnamon Cream the butter, add sugar gradually, egg well beaten, molasses, and flour mixed and sifted with ginger, salt, soda, and cinnamon. Chill, roll in sheets to one-fourth inch in thickness, bake on a buttered sheet, and cut in squares. ¼ cup butter 1/4 cup lard 1/4 cup boiling water 1/2 cup brown sugar 1/2 cup molasses 1 teaspoon soda
A stiff rolled gingerbread baked as one thin sheet and cut into squares — closer to a cookie than to a cake. The whole character depends on rolling it evenly at a quarter inch and cutting it the moment it leaves the oven.
- OvenThe recipe specifies no temperature. A thin sheet like this is usually baked in a moderate oven, around 350F, for roughly 10 to 14 minutes; pull it when the surface has lost its shine and the edges have set, since molasses doughs scorch quickly at the pan rim.
- Cut while hotScore and cut the squares within a minute or two of taking the sheet out. Once the molasses and sugar cool the sheet turns brittle and shatters along irregular lines instead of cutting cleanly.
- Ambiguous quantitiesSeveral of the printed amounts are inconsistent as given — the flour, salt and cinnamon figures have lost their fractions, and the soda is listed twice in different amounts. Treat the ingredient list as unreliable and work from a checked version of the recipe if you want dependable results.
- LardThe half-butter, half-lard mixture is period practice: lard gives a shorter, crisper bite than all butter. Leaf lard or a good rendered lard works; modern shelf-stable hydrogenated lard behaves differently and gives a waxier crumb.
- MolassesThe molasses ordinarily sold for baking was a lighter, less bitter grade than modern blackstrap. Use unsulphured light or dark molasses; blackstrap will overwhelm the ginger and make the sheet taste medicinal.
- Soda and acidThe soda is there to react with the acidity of the molasses, not to make the sheet rise much. Do not increase it — excess soda in a low-moisture dough leaves a soapy, faintly metallic aftertaste and darkens the crumb.
- ChillingThe chilling step is not optional. A warm molasses dough sticks to the pin and stretches, which gives uneven thickness and squares that bake at different rates. An hour in the refrigerator is enough.
- YieldA sheet from roughly this quantity of dough, rolled to a quarter inch, gives somewhere around three dozen two-inch squares.
Gingerbread in American cookbooks of this period splits into two families: the soft, cake-like loaf raised with soda and eaten in slices, and the hard rolled kind baked flat and broken or cut into pieces. This is the second sort, and the name "card gingerbread" is often said to refer to its shape — a thin, flat, stiff sheet cut into rectangles like playing cards or calling cards — though that derivation is traditional rather than documented. What is clear is that a hard sheet of this kind kept far better in a tin than a soft gingerbread would.