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Hard Sugar Gingerbread
5 cups flour ¾ tablespoon baking powder 1½ teaspoons salt ¾ tablespoon ginger Cream the butter, add sugar gradually, milk, and dry ingredients mixed and siftéd. Put some of mixture on an inverted dripping-pan and roll as thinly as possible to cover pan. Mark dough with a coarse grater. Sprinkle with sugar and bake in a moderate oven. Before removing from pan, cut in strips four and one-half inches long by one and one-half inches wide.
This is a rolled, crisp gingerbread — closer to a thin spice cracker than to a cake — baked in one sheet on the underside of a pan and cut into fingers while still warm.
- Moderate ovenThe recipe gives no temperature; "moderate" is usually taken today as somewhere around 350°F. A sheet rolled this thin should be checked early, perhaps after 10 minutes; take it out when the surface is dry and the edges have coloured, since it darkens fast at the thin spots.
- Dripping-pan, invertedA dripping-pan is the shallow rimmed roasting pan that sat under a joint. Turning it over gives a flat, rimless surface to roll on, exactly what a modern rimless cookie sheet or an upturned half-sheet pan provides.
- The measurements as givenThe baking powder and ginger both read ¾ tablespoon, about 2¼ teaspoons of each, as the printed page gives them. The butter, sugar and milk are not stated at all, so those proportions have to be judged rather than copied.
- Consistency is the real guideAim for a stiff, short dough that holds together without cracking and can be rolled to about 1/8 inch. If it tears, work in milk a spoonful at a time; if it sticks, chill it before rolling.
- Marking with a graterPressing a coarse box grater over the surface gives the pebbled finish typical of these hard gingerbreads.
- Cut hot, cool flatScore the strips — 4½ by 1½ inches — the moment the pan comes out. Once cool the sheet is brittle and will shatter along its own lines rather than yours.
- Yield and keepingThe count depends entirely on the size of the pan, and with the butter, sugar and milk unrecorded the batch size cannot be worked out. Stored airtight they harden further and keep well.
"Hard" gingerbread distinguishes this kind from the soft, molasses-heavy cake baked in a pan; here sugar replaces molasses, hence "sugar gingerbread," and the dough is rolled thin and baked dry so it keeps. Sheets of it were cut into fingers for lunch pails, travel and the tin box — keeping food of much the same order, one might say, as ship's biscuit and the ginger snap. Several gradations of the family — soft, hard, sugar, molasses — were commonly gathered together in period cookbooks, which reflects a time when gingerbread was less a single dish than a whole category of household baking, made with whatever fat and sweetening the kitchen kept on hand.