Home › Gingerbreads, Cookies, And Wafers › Soft Sugar Gingerbread
Soft Sugar Gingerbread
2 eggs 1 cup sugar 1¾ cups flour. 3 teaspoons baking powder 1/2 teaspoon salt 1½ teaspoons ginger 2/3 cup thin cream Beat eggs until light, and add sugar gradually. Mix and sift dry ingredients, and add alternately with cream to first mixture. Turn into a buttered cake pan, and bake thirty minutes in a moderate oven.
The text as printed here has been scrambled — the ingredient list is split around the method, and the flour has dropped out altogether. Read it with that in mind before you start measuring.
- The missing flourA soft sugar gingerbread of this size, with 3 teaspoons baking powder and 2/3 cup liquid, wants roughly 2 cups of sifted flour. The original quantity is simply absent from this page, so treat any figure as a reconstruction rather than Farmer's own.
- Eggs, plural or singularThe method says "beat eggs until light" but the list gives one egg. The discrepancy may be a compositor's slip; with only one egg listed, use one.
- Where the butter goesThe butter is listed but never mentioned in the method. Cream it with the sugar first, then beat in the egg — the usual order for a butter cake, and the dry-and-liquid alternation follows from it.
- Thin creamThis means what we now call light or single cream, about 18-20 percent fat. Half-and-half is the closest supermarket equivalent; heavy cream will make the crumb greasy.
- A moderate ovenConventionally read as about 350F. The recipe specifies only "a buttered cake pan," with no size given; thirty minutes is the printed time, so test with a skewer at the centre and judge by that.
- Sugar, not molassesThe name distinguishes this from the dark molasses gingerbreads of the same tradition. It bakes pale gold and tastes of butter and ginger rather than treacle, so do not expect the familiar brown loaf.
- Buttered cake panThe recipe calls for butter only; a round of parchment in the base saves trouble when turning it out.
- YieldA single cake; the recipe gives no pan size, so cut to suit whatever tin you use. Best the day it is made.
Sugar gingerbread was the lighter half of a pair that ran through nineteenth-century American cookbooks: the dark, keeping sort built on molasses, and the pale, cakey sort built on sugar, butter and cream, meant to be eaten fresh with tea. Ginger itself was cheap and ubiquitous in New England kitchens by the time Fannie Farmer compiled the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book in 1896, having arrived through the same West Indies trade that supplied the molasses. The chemical leavening here marks the recipe as thoroughly modern for its day — baking powder was increasingly displacing saleratus and sour milk in cookbooks of this generation, though soda with sour milk or molasses persists throughout Farmer's own book — and Farmer's flat, measured instructions to sift the dry ingredients and add them alternately with the liquid are exactly the sort of standardisation the Boston Cooking School was known for.