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Hot Water Gingerbread
1 cup molasses 1/2 cup boiling water 2¼ cups flour 1 teaspoon soda 1½ teaspoons ginger 1/2 teaspoon salt 4 tablespoons melted butter Add water to molasses. Mix and sift dry ingredients, combine mixtures, add butter, and beat vigorously. Pour into a buttered shallow pan, and bake twenty-five minutes in a moderate oven. Chicken fat tried out and clarified furnishes an excellent shortening, and may be used in place of butter.
A plain molasses gingerbread with no eggs and no milk, leavened entirely by soda reacting with molasses. It comes together in one bowl and depends on speed more than technique.
- The flour quantityThe printed figure has lost its fraction; the workable amount is 2 1/4 cups of all-purpose flour. Anything much beyond that gives a dry, bready crumb rather than the moist, sticky one this batter is after.
- Oven temperatureA moderate oven is usually taken as 350-375F. Twenty-five minutes suits a shallow pan, roughly 8 or 9 inches square; a deeper pan will need 30 to 35 minutes and a skewer test.
- Work quicklyThe soda begins reacting with the acid in the molasses the moment they meet. Beat vigorously as instructed, but get the batter into a buttered pan and into a preheated oven without delay or the rise is spent on the counter.
- Soda, not baking powderThe teaspoon of soda here is neutralized by the acid in the molasses. Do not substitute baking powder measure for measure; the result will be flatter and can taste sour.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cooking molasses, not blackstrap, which is far more bitter than what the book intended. Grandma's or a similar table molasses is the closest match.
- Chicken fatThe alternative shortening is rendered and strained chicken fat, a thrifty use for drippings. It works, and it gives a slightly softer crumb, though the flavor is faintly savory. Melted butter is the safer choice for most palates.
- YieldAn 8-inch square pan cut into nine or twelve squares. Best warm, the day it is baked; it stiffens noticeably by the second day.
Hot-water gingerbread is among the plainest of the American molasses cakes, and its economy is the point: no eggs, no milk, no creaming, and a fat that could be scraped off yesterday's roasting pan. Boiling water thins the molasses so it can be beaten smooth into the flour quickly, and versions of this appear repeatedly in nineteenth-century household manuals, often under the name soft gingerbread. Molasses stayed in heavy use as a sweetener in New England baking well after refined sugar became cheaper, in part because the region's trade had long run on it.