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Soft Molasses Gingerbread
1 cup molasses 1 egg 1/3 cup butter 2 cups flour 1¾ teaspoons soda 18 2 teaspoons ginger ½ teaspoon salt ½ cup sour milk Put butter and molasses in saucepan and cook until boiling-point is reached. Remove from fire, add soda, and beat vigorously. Then add milk, egg well beaten, and remaining ingredients mixed and sifted. Bake fifteen minutes in buttered small tin pans, having pans two-thirds filled with mixture.
A one-bowl-plus-saucepan gingerbread that leans on the reaction between hot molasses and soda for its lift. The heat step is what makes it work, and it is easy to rush.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none, as was standard when ranges had no thermometers. Bake at 350F; small tins two-thirds full will be done in about 15 minutes, when the tops spring back.
- The hinge: molasses and sodaBring the butter and molasses just to a boil, pull the pan off the heat, then beat in the soda. The mixture will foam up dramatically. Beat it vigorously and move on quickly, since that foam is the aeration you are counting on.
- Sour milkThis means milk that had soured naturally: mildly acidic and slightly thickened. Use buttermilk, or stir a teaspoon of lemon juice or vinegar into a half cup of whole milk and let it stand five minutes.
- MolassesUse unsulphured light or dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is far more bitter than what this book intended and will overpower the ginger.
- Quantities to judgeThe soda, salt and milk figures in this printing are unreliable. A workable reading for one cup of molasses and two cups of flour is about 1 1/2 teaspoons soda, 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/2 cup sour milk, but treat those as a starting point rather than the author's numbers.
- Don't overheat the molassesBoiling point only. Molasses held at a boil darkens and turns acrid fast, and the residual heat will start to set the egg when you add it. Let the pan cool a minute before the beaten egg goes in.
- Pans and yield"Small tin pans" most likely means gem or muffin tins. Expect roughly a dozen; the same batter should work in an 8-inch square pan at 350F for something like 25 to 30 minutes.
- TextureThe batter is loose and pours rather than spoons. Do not add flour to stiffen it, or the crumb goes tough and dry.
Soft gingerbread, as opposed to the hard rolled gingerbread cut into shapes, was a fixture of the nineteenth-century New England kitchen because it depended on two things many households had: molasses from the West Indies trade and soured milk from the day before. Before chemical leavening, gingerbread relied on yeast or on hard-beaten eggs. The trick of boiling the molasses with the butter and beating soda into the hot mixture turns up in American cookbooks of the period, and is said to give a lighter, more open crumb than simply stirring the soda into the flour.