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Spiced Gingerbread
Prepare a dough with one pound of butter melted in one quart of warm molasses, half a pound of brown sugar, six eggs, three-quarters of a pound of ground ginger, a quarter of a pound of ground allspice, two ounces of ground cloves, three pounds of sifted flour and four tablespoonfuls of saleratus. Form into cakes and put in a moderate oven and bake. If preferred it may be baked in loaves. It should be eaten cold.
A commercial-scale gingerbread from a hotel kitchen: roughly seven pounds of dough before the eggs are counted. Everything about it needs scaling down, and the spice measures need a hard look before you commit.
- Scale it down firstAs written this makes something like 60-70 small cakes or five or six loaves. Quartering the recipe (4 oz butter, 1 cup molasses, 2 oz brown sugar, 1 egg plus a yolk, 12 oz flour, 1 tablespoon soda) gives a manageable batch.
- SaleratusSaleratus was the household leavening of the period. By the later nineteenth century it was generally sodium bicarbonate, but earlier saleratus was potassium bicarbonate, so treat it as roughly rather than exactly equivalent to modern baking soda. Four tablespoons across three pounds of flour and a quart of molasses is aggressive; a scant tablespoon per 12 oz flour is nearer modern practice.
- The spice loadThree-quarters of a pound of ground ginger, four ounces of allspice and two ounces of cloves is extraordinary even for a batch this size, and would give a cake that is closer to medicine than dessert by current palates. Ground spice of the period may well have been coarser and staler than what is sold now, though that is an assumption rather than a documented fact. Start at about 3 tablespoons ginger, 1 tablespoon allspice and 1 teaspoon cloves per 12 oz flour and go up from there.
- Melting butter into warm molassesThis is the hinge. The molasses should be warm enough to melt the butter and no warmer -- if it is hot when the eggs go in they will scramble, and hot molasses will start the soda reacting before the flour is in.
- A quart of molassesFour cups. Use unsulphured cooking molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter and will fight the spice.
- Moderate ovenThe recipe gives no temperature; 'moderate' is conventionally read today as somewhere around 350F. Small cakes want 12-15 minutes; a loaf in a standard 9x5 pan will take 45-55 minutes, and molasses batters brown deceptively early, so test with a skewer rather than by colour.
- "Form into cakes"The recipe calls this a dough and says to form it, but the proportions of molasses and butter to flour suggest something softer than a rolled dough. If it is too slack to shape, spoon it into mounds on a lined sheet, leaving room to spread, or divide it between loaf pans.
- Eaten coldNot a nicety. Molasses cake is crumbly and tastes raw and salt-sharp while warm; the flavour settles and the crumb firms after several hours. It keeps well wrapped for the better part of a week and improves on day two.
Oscar Tschirky was never technically the chef at the Waldorf -- he was the maître d'hôtel -- but the 1896 book that carries his name is generally taken to draw on the working formulas of the hotel's kitchens, which is why quantities like a quart of molasses and three pounds of flour appear without apology. Molasses gingerbread was the everyday American cake of the nineteenth century: molasses was cheaper than refined sugar, and the pairing of an acidic syrup with saleratus gave reliable lift in the decades before commercial baking powder was universal. Saleratus, literally "aerated salt," was the household leavening of the mid-1800s; the name covered potassium bicarbonate earlier in the century before coming to be associated with what we now sell as bicarbonate of soda, and its survival in an 1896 hotel recipe shows how long kitchen vocabulary outlasts the product it named. The heavy hand with ginger, allspice and cloves also reflects an older taste for spice cakes kept as pantry staples rather than served fresh -- cakes meant to be sliced cold with tea or coffee, days after baking.