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Gossamer Gingerbread
1/3 cup butter. 1 cup sugar. 1 egg. 1 7/8 cups flour. 1/2 cup milk 17% cups flour 3 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon yellow ginger Cream the butter, add sugar gradually, then egg well beaten. Add milk, and dry ingredients mixed and sifted. Spread in a buttered dripping-pan as thinly as possible, using the back of mixing-spoon. Bake thirty minutes. Sprinkle with sugar, and cut in small squares or diamonds before removing from pan.
A wafer-thin sheet gingerbread, baked in one pan and cut warm into squares. Everything depends on how thinly it is spread.
- Spread it almost transparentThe batter is stiff and must be pushed out with the back of the spoon until the pan bottom nearly shows through. A thicker sheet will bake into ordinary cake rather than the crisp, brittle sheet the name promises.
- Dripping-panThis means a shallow rectangular roasting or jelly-roll pan; something in the region of 10 by 15 inches will do. Butter it well; a paper lining makes lifting the sheet out simpler.
- Oven heatNo oven heat is given; the recipe says only to bake. A moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern setting. Set a rack in the middle of the oven so the underside does not scorch before the top colours.
- Watch the timeThe recipe directs thirty minutes. A sheet spread as thinly as directed may well colour sooner in a modern oven, so begin checking well before the time is up, when the surface has lost its shine and the edges are deep brown.
- Yellow gingerAlmost certainly ordinary ground dried ginger; period spice dealers distinguished grades of ginger, including bleached or "white" ginger. One teaspoon in a full sheet is a light hand; up to two suits present-day palates and weaker jars of spice.
- Measuring the flourFlour was sifted before measuring and the cup levelled off, giving nearer 4 oz to the cup than the 5 oz a scooped cup yields. Weigh rather than pack it: extra flour here makes the batter too stiff to spread thin.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons is in line with the usual proportion of roughly a teaspoon per half cup of flour, and will lift the thin sheet slightly as it sets. Use fresh powder and get the pan into the oven promptly.
- Cut while hotSprinkle the sugar and score the squares or diamonds the moment the pan leaves the oven. Once cool the sheet shatters instead of cutting, and it will not release cleanly from the pan.
- Yield and keepingNo yield is given; a full sheet cut into small squares or diamonds will give a good many pieces. Store airtight the same day; the crispness goes soft within a day or two in humid weather.
Thin, crisp sheet gingerbreads like this one sit at the wafer end of a family that runs all the way to the soft, molasses-dark loaf gingerbreads. "Gossamer" is used in cookbooks of the period as a descriptive term for anything rolled or spread paper-thin. What distinguishes this recipe from a rolled ginger wafer is that the dough is never rolled or cut before baking: it is spread once, baked as a single sheet, and divided hot. The instruction to use "yellow" ginger is a reminder that spice at the turn of the century still came in recognisably different grades, and that a cook was expected to know which jar to reach for.