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Excellent Soft Ginger-Bread
One and a half cups Orleans molasses, half cup brown sugar, half cup butter, half cup sweet milk, tea-spoon soda, tea-spoon allspice, half tea-spoon ginger; mix all together thoroughly, add three cups sifted flour and bake in shallow pans. --Mrs. S. W
A plain molasses gingerbread of the sort that was mixed in one bowl and baked flat rather than as a loaf. The original assumes you know what a moderate oven feels like and how long a shallow pan takes; both are worth pinning down.
- Oven and panThe recipe specifies no temperature or time; 350F is a reasonable modern setting. "Shallow pans" suggests something like a 9x13 pan, giving a cake about an inch thick; expect roughly 22-30 minutes, and test with a skewer at the center. Two 8-inch square pans work equally well.
- Orleans molassesNew Orleans molasses was generally reckoned a lighter, milder grade than the dark West India product — sweet rather than bitter. Use unsulphured mild molasses. Blackstrap is a different product entirely and will make the cake harsh and dark.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh, unsoured whole milk, specified to distinguish it from the buttermilk or clabber that many recipes of the period called for. Since there is no acid dairy here, the soda relies on the molasses for its reaction.
- The sodaOne teaspoon for a cup and a half of molasses is a modest amount, and it needs to be evenly distributed. The recipe puts it in with the liquids; dissolving it in the milk, or else whisking it through the sifted flour, both guard against pockets of undissolved soda.
- ButterSoften it and cream it with the brown sugar before adding the liquids, or melt it and stir everything together — either produces a workable batter. Half a cup is one stick, 4 ounces.
- SpicingA teaspoon of allspice to half a teaspoon of ginger is unusually allspice-forward for something called gingerbread. If you want the cake to taste as its name suggests, reverse the proportions or take the ginger up to a full two teaspoons; a little cinnamon and a pinch of cloves are in keeping.
- SaltNone is listed; butter was commonly sold salted at this date, which may account for it. With unsalted butter add half a teaspoon of salt to the flour.
- Texture and yieldThe batter is pourable but thick, and the crumb is soft and quite moist — it improves on the second day if kept covered. One 9x13 pan cuts into about 15 squares, served plain, with butter, or with whipped cream.
Soft gingerbread — meaning cake rather than the rolled, crisp cookie sort — was one of the most common entries in nineteenth-century American cookbooks, and it is often said that its popularity owed something to needing no eggs and depending on molasses, which was generally cheaper and more reliably stocked than white sugar in most Southern and rural pantries. The reference to "Orleans molasses" places the recipe firmly in a Gulf-trade economy: the term denoted Louisiana-produced molasses shipped through New Orleans, and cooks distinguished those milder grades by name from the darker, more bitter West Indies product. The Dixie Cook Book, like the Ohio-published Buckeye books it was adapted from, gathered its recipes by attribution from contributing housewives, and the terse initials at the end — Mrs. S. W. — are typical of that method: a community collection printed largely as submitted, quantities and all, with the baker expected to supply the judgment.