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SOUR MILK AND CREAM (Mix molasses sour milk)
Mix molasses, sour milk, and beaten egg well together, and add cocoa, ginger, salt, and flour.
Dissolve the soda in a very little hot water and add it. Beat in the melted shortening at the last.
Bake in a shallow pan or muffin-tins in a moderate oven about twenty-five minutes. A mixture of Porto Rico and New Orleans molasses gives the best results.
This is a molasses-and-cocoa gingerbread, printed as method only — the ingredient list that belonged with it is not on the page. Read it as a set of instructions rather than a complete formula.
- No quantities are givenThe entry names molasses, sour milk, egg, cocoa, ginger, salt, flour, soda and shortening but no amounts, so it cannot be scaled or reproduced as written. Use it alongside a measured molasses gingerbread recipe and follow its technique.
- "Sour milk" means clabbered milk, not spoiled milkRaw milk soured predictably into a thick, acid clabber that reacted with soda. Pasteurized milk left on the counter spoils instead; buttermilk, or milk with a tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice per cup, is the working equivalent.
- Moderate ovenConventionally read as somewhere around 350F. Twenty-five minutes suggests a thin bake — muffin tins or a shallow pan; a deeper pan would need longer, but with no quantities given the pan size and timing can only be guessed at.
- Soda dissolved in hot waterThis is the hinge. The soda is the only leavening, activated by the acid in the sour milk and molasses, and dissolving it first prevents brown-speckled bitter pockets. Once it goes in, get the batter into the pan and the pan into the oven without delay.
- Shortening last, and meltedBeating fat in at the end keeps it from coating the flour -- but it should be barely warm, not hot, so it does not set the egg. "Shortening" in this period could mean lard, butter, or a manufactured vegetable fat; melted butter works and tastes better.
- Porto Rico and New Orleans molassesBoth were table molasses rather than blackstrap, lighter and less bitter. Modern unsulphured molasses is the closest match; avoid blackstrap, which will overwhelm the cocoa and the ginger.
- CocoaThe cocoa here is a flavour note in a gingerbread, not a chocolate cake. Natural (non-alkalized) cocoa is the likelier product for an American recipe of this kind, and it adds acid the soda can use; Dutch-process cocoa is neutral and contributes nothing to the leavening.
Molasses gingerbread was the everyday cake of the American kitchen for most of the nineteenth century, cheaper than a butter-and-sugar cake and reliably leavened by the reaction between soda and whatever acid the household had to hand — sour milk, buttermilk, or the molasses itself. The distinction the recipe draws between Porto Rico and New Orleans molasses reflects a period when cooks bought syrup by origin the way one now buys olive oil: Louisiana cane syrup and the Caribbean grades each had their partisans, and blending was at least sometimes advised. That it appears under the heading 'Sour Milk and Cream' shows the logic of that kind of cookery — the point is not the bread but the souring milk in the pantry, an ingredient that had to be used before it went further and that these batters were designed to absorb.