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Sour-milk Gingerbread
1 scant cup molasses ½ cup thick sour milk 4 tablespoonfuls melted shortening 2 cups flour 1 egg 4 tablespoonfuls cocoa 1 teaspoonful ginger teaspoonful soda teaspoonful salt
An ingredient list with no method, typical of early twentieth-century books that assumed the cook knew what to do with molasses and soda. The proportions are sound; everything else has to be supplied.
- Sour milk means buttermilk"Thick sour milk" was raw milk left to clabber, which modern pasteurized milk will not do safely — it spoils rather than sours. Use ½ cup cultured buttermilk, or ½ cup milk with 1½ teaspoons lemon juice or vinegar stirred in and left ten minutes.
- The missing quantitiesThe soda, salt and ginger appear as bare "teaspoonful" in the text as transcribed, the numeral lost. Read each as 1 teaspoon; with a scant cup of molasses and ½ cup sour milk, 1 teaspoon soda is the usual neutralizing amount and more would taste soapy.
- ShorteningFour tablespoons melted shortening is ¼ cup. Melted butter or a neutral oil both work; the original shortening was lard or a hydrogenated vegetable fat.
- Method, since none is givenBeat molasses, egg and melted fat together, stir the soda into the sour milk and add it, then fold in the flour sifted with cocoa, ginger and salt. Mix only until smooth — soda-and-molasses batters begin reacting at once and should go into the pan promptly.
- Oven and panBake at 350°F in a greased 8-inch square pan for 30 to 35 minutes, until the center springs back. Molasses and cocoa both brown fast, so judge doneness by touch rather than color.
- The cocoaFour tablespoons of cocoa in a gingerbread is unusual and makes a dark, faintly bitter cake rather than a chocolate one. Natural (non-alkalized) cocoa suits the recipe better, since the soda is already doing the acid-neutralizing work.
- Where the left-over bread wentThe recipe calls for no bread at all. If you want to work crumbs in, ½ to ¾ cup fine dry crumbs can be substituted for an equal volume of flour; expect a slightly coarser crumb.
- YieldOne 8-inch square, cut into nine or twelve pieces. Best on the second day, once the molasses has drawn moisture back through the crumb.
Sour-milk gingerbread belongs to the long American tradition of chemically leavened molasses cakes, which took hold once saleratus and then baking soda became cheap household goods in the mid-nineteenth century: soda needs an acid, and sour milk or clabber supplied it for free. Molasses was the cheap sweetener against refined sugar. The cocoa is likely a later addition, packaged cocoa having become inexpensive by the early twentieth century.