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Sour Milk Gingerbread
1 cup molasses 1 cup sour milk 2⅓ cups flour 1¾ teaspoons soda 2 teaspoons ginger 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/4 cup melted butter Mix soda with sour milk and add to molasses. Sift together remaining dry ingredients, combine mixtures, add butter, and beat vigorously. Pour into a buttered shallow pan, and bake twenty-five minutes in a moderate oven.
A plain molasses gingerbread leavened entirely by the reaction of soda with sour milk. The fractions have suffered in transcription, so read the quantities carefully before you start.
- The flour measure"21/3 cups flour" is 2 1/3 cups; the soda reads 1¾ teaspoons as printed. Weigh the flour if you can: 2 1/3 cups is roughly 290 g.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured raw milk, thick and acidic. Pasteurised milk left out spoils rather than sours, so use buttermilk cup for cup, or stir 1 tablespoon of lemon juice or white vinegar into 1 cup of whole milk and let it stand ten minutes.
- MolassesUse unsulphured light or dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is more bitter than what would ordinarily have been sold as cooking molasses. Treacle works if that is what is on hand.
- Moderate oven350°F (175°C). At twenty-five minutes the cake will be set but still moist; test with a skewer at twenty and give it up to thirty-five if the pan is deep.
- The pan"Shallow" means about an inch of batter — an 8- or 9-inch square pan, well buttered. A loaf tin will not bake through in the stated time.
- Work quicklyThe soda is dissolved into the acidic milk and begins releasing gas at once. Combine, beat briefly but firmly to smooth the batter, and get it into the oven; batter left standing loses some of its lift.
- Beating"Beat vigorously" need not mean a long beating: thirty seconds of brisk mixing to smooth the batter is enough, as longer working builds gluten and can give a tough, tunnelled crumb.
- YieldOne 8-inch square cake, nine to twelve squares. Best warm, plain or with whipped cream; it keeps three or four days and improves on the second day.
Sour milk gingerbread belongs to the long tradition of American cakes leavened by acid and alkali rather than yeast or eggs — a technique that spread rapidly in the nineteenth century once saleratus, and then refined baking soda, became cheap and widely sold. Here the leavening comes from the soda and the sour milk, with molasses as the sweetener, and the recipe cost almost nothing and used up what would otherwise be wasted. Gingerbread is a cake, and was baked in a shallow pan and cut into squares.