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New York Gingerbread
1 cup butter (scant) 1½ cups flour 2 tablespoons yellow ginger 5 eggs 1½ cups powdered sugar 1 teaspoon baking powder Cream the butter, and add flour gradually, mixed and sifted with ginger. Beat the yolks of the eggs until thick and lemon-colored, and add sugar gradually. Combine mixtures, add whites of eggs, beaten until stiff, and sift over baking powder. Beat thoroughly, turn into a buttered deep cake pan, and bake one hour in a moderate oven.
This is a gingerbread with no molasses and no liquid at all — essentially a rich butter sponge carrying a very heavy dose of ground ginger. The method is unusual and the order matters more than the timing.
- "Yellow ginger"In cookbooks of this period the term appears to mean ordinary dried ground ginger, as distinct from green (fresh) or preserved ginger; it is not turmeric. Two tablespoons is roughly 11 g, a genuinely fierce amount; the flavour is the point of the cake, but a fresh jar will taste far stronger than a three-year-old one.
- Powdered sugarIn 1896 powdered sugar meant a fine granulated sugar, finer than table sugar but not the cornstarch-laden confectioners' sugar sold today. Use superfine or caster sugar; modern icing sugar will make the batter pasty.
- Butter creamed with flourThe flour goes into the butter, not the sugar — an older technique that coats the flour in fat and gives a short, tender crumb rather than a springy one. Have the butter soft but not melting, and work it only until smooth.
- The hinge: the whitesThere is no milk or water in this batter, so the beaten whites carry much of the aeration, alongside the teaspoon of baking powder. Fold them in and sift the baking powder over as directed. Note that the recipe itself says "beat thoroughly" at this stage.
- Oven temperatureA moderate oven is usually rendered as about 350F, though period sources put it anywhere from 325 to 375F. Because the batter is dense and the pan deep, the outside sets long before the centre; if the top is colouring hard at 30 minutes, drop to 325F.
- Pan and timeA deep cake pan means something like an 8-inch round at least 3 inches deep, or a tube pan, buttered as the recipe directs. One hour is plausible for a deep pan but test at 45 minutes with a skewer — modern ovens hold their temperature more evenly than a coal range.
- YieldMakes one cake, serving roughly 10 to 12. It keeps well wrapped for several days.
Much nineteenth-century American gingerbread was dark, soft and built on molasses, the cheap by-product of sugar refining that sweetened New England baking for two centuries. Alongside it ran a smaller tradition of pale gingerbreads — sometimes called white or sponge gingerbread — leavened with eggs and sweetened with refined sugar, which made them a more expensive and more genteel cake. This is one of those. Regional labels of this kind were often loose geographic tags attached to variant recipes, and it is not clear that this one records anything specific about New York. What the recipe does show is a moment when ground ginger was cheap and plentiful enough to be measured by the tablespoon, and when refined white sugar and reliable chemical baking powder had both become ordinary household goods — the conditions behind Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, first published in 1896, and its push towards level measurements and repeatable results.