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Hot Water Gingerbread
Take one-half cup of boiling water and mix it with one cup of molasses. Add one teaspoon of soda, dissolved in one-fourth cup of lukewarm water, one-half teaspoon of salt, one and one-half teaspoons of ginger, and two and one-half cups of flour. Lastly beat in thoroughly a scant half-cup of butter and lard mixed which have been melted. Bake one-half hour in a moderate oven.
A soft molasses gingerbread leavened entirely by soda reacting with the acid in the molasses — no eggs, no buttermilk, no baking powder. It comes together as a thin batter poured straight into the pan.
- Oven temperatureA "moderate oven" is usually read as somewhere around 350-375F. Half an hour at that heat suits a batter this thin baked in a single layer; test with a skewer at 25 minutes.
- Pan size, which the recipe omitsThe batter runs to roughly a quart. A greased 8x8-inch or 9x9-inch square pan gives the right depth for a half-hour bake. In a loaf pan the centre is likely to be underbaked at 30 minutes.
- The fat goes in last for a reasonThe fat goes in last -- the melted butter and lard are beaten into an already-mixed batter rather than creamed at the start, so follow the order as given; mixing them in earlier will affect the crumb.
- Butter and lard mixedThe recipe does not give proportions; equal parts is a reasonable reading, lard for shortness and butter for flavour. All butter works and browns a little more; modern shortening substitutes for the lard. "Scant half-cup" means just under 4 oz total.
- Molasses mattersUse unsulphured cooking molasses, not blackstrap and not sorghum. Blackstrap is far more bitter, and its balance against a full teaspoon of soda is unreliable; the result can taste soapy or metallic.
- Work quickly once the soda is inThe soda begins reacting with the molasses immediately. Have the pan greased and the oven at temperature before you dissolve it, and get the batter into the oven without delay.
- SeasoningA teaspoon and a half of ginger is mild by current taste. Half a teaspoon of cinnamon and a pinch of cloves are period-appropriate additions if you want more depth.
- Yield and servingAn 8-inch pan cuts into nine or twelve squares. Best warm, plain or with butter; it keeps two or three days wrapped and improves on the second day as the molasses flavor settles.
Hot-water gingerbread is the plainest branch of a large American family — cakes leavened by soda alone, made without eggs or milk, and cheap enough to bake weekly. The hot water does real work here: it thins the molasses so it can be stirred smooth and warms the batter so the soda reacts briskly. That soda is the newer element in an old dish; gingerbread in the eighteenth century relied on pearlash or on long-fermented doughs, and it was the spread of cheap chemical leavening — saleratus, a term that originally denoted potassium bicarbonate and only later came to be used for the sodium salt — that produced the soft, cakey molasses gingerbread most people now picture. It was an everyday sweet built from pantry staples, molasses and lard rather than sugar and butter, and one expected of a home cook rather than a pastry cook.