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Fairy Gingerbread
1/2 cup butter 1 cup light brown sugar 1/2 cup milk 17% cups bread flour 2 teaspoons ginger Cream the butter, add sugar gradually, and milk very slowly. Mix and sift flour and ginger, and combine mixtures. Spread very thinly with a broad, long-bladed knife on a buttered, inverted dripping-pan. Bake in a moderate oven. Cut in squares before removing from pan. Watch carefully and turn pan frequently during baking, that all may be evenly cooked. If mixture around edge of pan is cooked before that in the centre, pan should be removed from oven, cooked part cut off, and remainder returned to oven to finish cooking. 3/4 cup butter 1½ cups sugar 3/4 cup milk
A wafer, not a cake: the batter goes onto the back of a sheet pan in a film thin enough to see the metal through, and bakes to a brittle sheet that shatters into squares. Everything about the method serves that thinness.
- The hinge: spread it thinner than feels rightThe recipe says only "very thinly," with a broad, long-bladed knife; in practice that means something on the order of 1/16 inch, thin enough that the pan shows through in places. Anything much thicker bakes into a soft chewy cookie rather than a crisp wafer.
- Flour quantityThe flour figure has not survived legibly in this text. Other printings of this recipe call for about 1 3/4 cups of bread flour, which gives a batter that spreads under a knife without tearing; start there and judge by consistency.
- Bread flourThe recipe specifies bread flour, as was common in cookbooks of this period; the higher gluten plausibly helps the sheet hold together when spread paper-thin. All-purpose works but the sheet is more fragile to handle.
- OvenA moderate oven is roughly 350-375F. At that heat a sheet this thin will need only about 8 to 12 minutes; it is done when evenly light brown, and it goes from brown to burnt very quickly.
- Inverted dripping-panA dripping-pan is a shallow rectangular roasting pan. Turn it upside down and butter the flat underside so there are no sides to block the spatula; a modern rimless cookie sheet or the back of a half-sheet pan does the same job.
- Uneven bakingThe edges will always set first. Pull the pan, cut away and lift off the finished border, and return the rest, as instructed; the recipe's direction to turn the pan frequently helps but will not eliminate the problem.
- Cutting and coolingScore into squares the moment the pan leaves the oven, while the sheet is still pliable. Once it cools it becomes glass-brittle and will splinter rather than cut.
- Yield and keepingKeeping -- They stay crisp only in an airtight tin; humidity softens them quickly.
Fairy gingerbread belongs to a family of tissue-thin spiced wafers often described as tea-table and party fare rather than everyday baking. The name is usually read as descriptive: fragile enough to seem insubstantial, in contrast to the thick molasses gingerbreads cut in squares from a loaf pan. Note that there is no molasses and no leavening at all here, which is what separates it from soft gingerbread; the sweetness comes from light brown sugar and the crispness from simply driving the moisture out of an extremely thin film of batter. The recipe is generally attributed to Fannie Farmer, and whatever its source, the spreading and the vigilant watching are the whole of the skill.