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Soft Molasses Gingerbread
¼ cup fat
½ teaspoon salt
1 cup molasses
1 tablespoon ginger
1 tablespoon vinegar
1 cup sour milk
2 cups flour
1 egg
1 teaspoon soda
Melt the fat, add the molasses, vinegar, and beaten egg. Mix and sift the dry ingredients and add alternately with the milk. Pour into a greased pan and bake twenty-five minutes in a moderate oven (360°-380° F.). Batter should be just thin enough so that the track left by the spoon in stirring disappears at once.
A thin-battered soft gingerbread of the sour-milk-and-soda school. The recipe is sound as written; most of what needs translating is the dairy, the fat and the pan.
- The batter consistency is the hingeThe closing line is the real instruction: the trail of the spoon should close over immediately. This is a pourable batter, closer to pancake batter than cake batter, and it is meant to be. Resist the urge to add flour to thicken it.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured whole milk, not modern pasteurised milk left out, which spoils rather than souring cleanly. Use buttermilk, or stir 1 tablespoon lemon juice or vinegar into 1 cup whole milk and let it stand ten minutes.
- FatIn home baking of this period this generally meant lard or a vegetable shortening; melted butter works and tastes better. A quarter cup is 4 tablespoons.
- MolassesUse unsulphured light or dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is far more bitter than the period product and will dominate the ginger.
- Soda, vinegar and saltOne teaspoon of soda is doing all the leavening, activated by the acid in both the molasses and the soured milk; the tablespoon of vinegar is insurance. Mix and bake promptly rather than letting the batter stand.
- GingerA full tablespoon of ground ginger is assertive by modern standards but correct for the style. If your jar has been open a year or more, it has faded and the full amount is warranted.
- Oven and panThe recipe helpfully gives the number: 360-380°F, so set a modern oven to 375°F. Use a greased 8- or 9-inch square pan; twenty-five minutes should be about right, and a tester in the centre should come out clean.
- YieldOne square pan, cut into 9 to 12 squares. Best warm, and it keeps a day or two well wrapped, since molasses holds moisture.
Soft molasses gingerbread was one of the standard American cakes of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, distinct from the hard, rolled gingerbread cut into shapes. Molasses was cheaper than refined sugar for most of that period and arrived in barrels in ordinary households, so it did double duty as sweetener and as the acid that let a spoonful of soda raise a cake without eggs to speak of or expensive baking powder. Sour milk belonged to the same economy: before refrigeration, milk turned sour as a matter of course and cooks built recipes to use it. That this appears in a Butterick book, published by a pattern company for a readership of home sewers and housekeepers, says something about the period's household literature, where a chapter of small cakes sat comfortably beside laundry hints and dress patterns. The unusually precise oven range given here, 360 to 380°F, marks the book as post-dating the spread of the oven thermometer, when writers were beginning to abandon "a moderate oven" for numbers.