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Gingerbread with Cocoanut
Put nine ounces each of wheat and rice flour into a basin and mix in eight ounces of moist sugar, one ounce of ground ginger, the grated rind of two lemons and an ounce and a half of candied citron cut up small. Put half a pound of butter into a saucepan with one pound of molasses, make them both hot, pour them into the flour mixture and stir well. Let it all cool, add seven ounces of cocoanut grated and pounded in a mortar. Beat well for a few minutes, put the mixture in small lumps on a buttered baking-sheet, place them in a slack oven, and bake for about forty-five minutes.
An English-style gingerbread drop cookie by weight, with no eggs and no chemical leavening — the texture depends entirely on the molasses-and-butter syrup and a long, low bake.
- Slack ovenA slack oven is a cool oven, usually glossed as somewhere around 275-325F. At the low end of that range the forty-five minutes is realistic; the cakes should be set and dry at the edge but still soft in the middle, firming as they cool.
- Weights to volumeNine ounces of wheat flour is about 2 cups, nine ounces of rice flour about 1¾ cups, eight ounces of sugar about 1 cup packed, half a pound of butter is two sticks, and a pound of molasses is roughly 1⅓ cups. Weigh if you can — the ratio of syrup to flour is what makes the crumb.
- Moist sugar"Moist sugar" is unrefined or partly refined soft brown sugar. Light brown sugar is the closest supermarket equivalent; it keeps the moisture the recipe assumes.
- Rice flourHalf the flour being rice flour looks deliberate rather than a substitution. It has no gluten, so it tends to give a shorter, sandier crumb. Plain white rice flour, not glutinous (sweet) rice flour.
- MolassesMolasses of this period was probably closer to today's unsulphured dark molasses or British black treacle than to light baking molasses. Avoid blackstrap, which is bitter in this quantity.
- The cocoanutThe recipe means fresh coconut, grated and pounded to a paste in a mortar so it releases oil and disappears into the dough. Dried desiccated coconut will work but stays as visible shreds and will drink moisture; unsweetened is essential, since the batter is already very sweet.
- Adding it off the heatThe recipe is explicit that the mixture should cool before the coconut goes in; cooler dough is stiffer and will spread less on the sheet.
- Shaping and spacing"Small lumps" means roughly walnut-sized, about a tablespoon and a half, set two inches apart — they spread moderately. Parchment is easier than a buttered sheet, as molasses doughs stick hard.
- YieldThe full quantity comes to about three and three-quarter pounds of dough by the recipe's own weights, giving roughly four to five dozen cakes. They keep well in a tin for a week and soften as they sit.
Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maître d'hôtel whose name fronted The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf (1896), compiled a volume far larger than any hotel kitchen's daily repertoire. This gingerbread shows its English parentage plainly: weights in ounces, a rice-flour-and-wheat mixture, candied citron, and treacle-style molasses melted with butter — a formula that would have looked at home in Eliza Acton or Mrs Beeton. The coconut may well be the American addition. By the 1890s grated coconut had become widely available in the United States as dried shredded product, and it turns up constantly in period cakes, pies and cookies. Gingerbread itself had by then long since split from the medieval spiced honey confection into a family of baked goods running from soft loaf cakes to the hard, keeping cakes sold at fairs; this one, dropped in lumps and baked slow, sits between the two.