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Best Ginger-Drops
Half cup sugar, a cup molasses, half cup butter, one tea-spoon each cinnamon, ginger and cloves, two tea-spoons soda in a cup boiling water, two and a half cups flour; add two well-beaten eggs the last thing before baking. Baked in gem-tins or as a common ginger-bread, and eaten warm with a sauce, they make a nice dessert. Mrs. C. Hawks,
A loose molasses batter leavened entirely with soda and baked in muffin cups. The proportions are workable as written, but two details need attention: the batter is far wetter than modern gingerbread, and the eggs really do go in last.
- Gem tinsA gem pan is a cast-iron muffin pan with deep, rounded cups. A standard 12-cup muffin tin is the direct substitute; grease it well, as there is no non-stick equivalent in this batter.
- Oven heatNone is given. A moderate oven, around 350F, suits it; small gems will take roughly 15 to 20 minutes, and the same batter baked as a sheet gingerbread in a 9-inch square roughly 30 to 35.
- The batter is thinTwo and a half cups flour against a cup of molasses and a cup of boiling water gives something closer to a pour batter than a dough. That is intentional and produces a moist, open crumb. Do not add flour to stiffen it.
- Eggs last, and bake at onceThe soda begins working the moment it hits the hot water and the acidic molasses. Have the pans greased and the oven up to temperature before the eggs go in, then get the batter into the tins immediately.
- Soda and molassesTwo teaspoons of soda for two and a half cups of flour is generous by modern standards; the acidity of a cup of molasses will neutralise part but not all of it. Use unsulphured dark molasses rather than blackstrap, which is harsher and will leave a soapy edge if the soda is not fully neutralised.
- Boiling waterThe recipe dissolves the soda in the cup of boiling water. If you prefer, pour the boiling water over the butter, sugar and molasses first so the butter melts, then stir the soda in; some of the lift may be lost as foam if the soda goes into water at a rolling boil.
- The sauceNineteenth-century gingerbread was served warm with a pudding sauce: hard sauce, a thin lemon sauce, or a sweetened cream. Any of these still suits it better than frosting.
- YieldRoughly a dozen to eighteen gems, or one 9-inch square cake. They are genuinely better warm, as the recipe says.
Gingerbread in an American household book of this vintage means a soft molasses cake, not the crisp rolled cookie; the book carries a number of variations on the theme, most of them differing only in the ratio of molasses to sugar and the choice of pan. Molasses was cheap and kept well. "Gem" pans are generally said to take their name from the small individual gem cakes baked in them; they spread through American kitchens with cast-iron hollowware in the second half of the nineteenth century. The attribution to Mrs. C. Hawks is typical of the book's method: like many regional compilations of the period, it was assembled from contributed household recipes and printed the contributor's name beside each one, which is why the same dish often appears more than once with small variations and different signatures.