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Sponge Ginger-Bread
One cup sour milk, one of Orleans molasses, a half cup butter, two eggs, one tea-spoon soda, one table-spoon ginger, flour to make as thick as pound cake; put butter, molasses and ginger together, make them quite warm, add the milk, flour, eggs and soda, and bake as soon as possible. - Mrs. M. M. M
A soda-and-sour-milk gingerbread with no oven temperature, no pan size and no flour quantity — all normal for 1880s printing, and all recoverable from the method. The one instruction that matters is the last one: mix and get it into the oven at once.
- Bake as soon as possibleSoda meets the acid of the sour milk and molasses the moment they combine, and the gas begins escaping immediately. Have the pan greased and the oven fully heated before the soda goes in; a batter left standing will lose some of its lift and bake denser.
- Sour milkGenuine clabbered raw milk, which modern pasteurised milk will not reliably become. Use cultured buttermilk cup for cup, or a cup of whole milk with a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar stirred in and left five minutes.
- Orleans molassesNew Orleans molasses was a mild, light-to-medium cane syrup, not blackstrap. Use unsulphured cooking molasses; blackstrap is far more bitter and mineral and will dominate the ginger.
- Flour to make as thick as pound cakePound cake batter is thick but still drops from the spoon rather than holding a shape. The original gives no quantity: add flour gradually and stop when the batter falls heavily off the spoon. This is an honest ambiguity in the original, not a figure the recipe gives.
- Warming the butter and molassesQuite warm means warm to the finger, not hot. The point is to melt the butter and loosen the molasses; too hot and the eggs will set into threads when they go in. Adding the cold milk next brings the temperature down before the eggs.
- GingerA full tablespoon of ground ginger is not a misprint; ground spice of the period may well have lost strength before it reached the kitchen. With fresh, potent ground ginger the result is assertively hot; two teaspoons gives a more familiar balance.
- Oven and panThe recipe gives no oven temperature; a moderate oven of about 350F is a reasonable modern equivalent. An 8-inch square or 9-inch round pan, greased, takes about 30 to 35 minutes; a tester in the centre should come out clean and the top spring back.
- YieldOne 8-inch square cake, nine generous squares. Best the day it is baked, though the molasses keeps it moist for two or three days under a cloth.
Sponge gingerbread is the lighter branch of the American gingerbread family — raised with soda and sour milk rather than the yeast or hard-baked stiffness of earlier cakes, and eaten in squares from the pan rather than rolled and cut. Its rise through the middle of the nineteenth century broadly tracks the spread of cheap chemical leavening: saleratus and then bicarbonate of soda put a quick cake within reach of kitchens that kept a crock of soured milk on the shelf. The specification of Orleans molasses is worth noting; cooks of the period distinguished mild New Orleans cane syrup from the darker, harsher West India sorts, and gingerbread recipes sometimes named which they wanted. The attribution to Mrs. M. M. M. is characteristic of the community-contributed cookbooks of the period, which were assembled from household receipts and printed the contributors' initials as credit.