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Training Day Ginger-Bread
One gallon molasses or strained honey, one and a quarter pounds butter, quarter pound soda stirred in a half tea-cup sweet milk, teaspoon alum dissolved in just enough water to cover it, flour to make it stiff enough to roll out; put the molasses in a very large dish, add the soda and butter melted, then all the other ingredients; mix in the evening and set in a warm place to rise over night; in the morning knead it a long time like bread, roll into squares half an inch thick, and bake in bread-pans in an oven heated about right for bread. To make it glossy, rub over the top just before putting it into the oven the following: One well-beaten egg, the same amount or a little more sweet cream, stirring cream and egg well together. This ginger-bread will keep an unlimited time. The recipe is complete without ginger, but two table-spoons may be used if preferred. -Over fifty years old, and formerly used for general muster days.
This is a militia-day batch: a gallon of molasses makes something on the order of fifteen to twenty pounds of dough. Scaling it down by a quarter or an eighth is the first decision to make.
- Scale and yieldThis makes an enormous quantity of dough: the gallon of molasses alone weighs some eleven or twelve pounds, and the flour needed to stiffen it adds much more again -- enough to fill several loaf pans and feed a crowd. Divide every quantity by four or eight for a household batch; the proportions hold.
- Oven "heated about right for bread"A moderate bread oven; in modern terms somewhere in the 350-400F range. The squares are half an inch thick going in but will puff; check at 15-20 minutes and pull them when the surface springs back and the edges pull from the pan.
- The soda is very highA quarter pound of soda is about eight tablespoons, some twenty-four teaspoons. Against a gallon of molasses -- sixteen cups -- the modern rule of a teaspoon per cup would give sixteen, so this is half again as much, and the excess is what gives old gingerbreads their dark colour and faintly soapy, mineral edge. Reduce it if you want the molasses flavour clean.
- AlumPotassium alum, sold today as pickling alum, was used in the period as a cheap leavening adjunct and dough conditioner. A single teaspoon across this volume is negligible and can simply be left out; it contributes nothing a modern cook wants.
- "Sweet milk" and "sweet cream"Both mean fresh and unsoured, as opposed to the soured milk and cream that were common enough in a nineteenth-century kitchen that the distinction had to be spelled out. Whole milk and heavy cream.
- The overnight riseThere is no yeast in the ingredient list, yet the dough is set in a warm place to rise overnight; a warm, wet, sugar-heavy dough left out that long may well pick up some ambient fermentation on top of the soda and alum. In a modern kitchen the result is unpredictable; an overnight rest in the refrigerator will hydrate the flour and mellow the soda without the gamble.
- Knead it a long timeThis is the hinge. The dough is treated like bread, not like a batter, and the long kneading is what makes it roll into sheets that hold their shape rather than spread. Undermixed, it bakes into a heavy slab.
- The glazeOne egg beaten with an equal volume or a little more of cream, brushed on just before baking. The recipe's stated purpose is gloss.
- Ginger optionalTwo tablespoons of dried ground ginger across a gallon of molasses is a whisper. If you want the bread to taste of ginger rather than of molasses, treble it in the scaled-down batch.
Training day, or muster day, was the periodic assembly of the local militia, a fixture of American town life from the colonial period through the mid-nineteenth century and as much a fair as a drill: cider, sweets and gingerbread sold from carts at the edge of the common. Gingerbread was the muster-field food of choice because it travelled, kept for weeks, and needed no plate, and hard, sliceable molasses gingerbreads of this type are widely recorded at such gatherings. The note that the recipe is "over fifty years old" places its origin around the 1830s, when compulsory militia musters were still general; by the time The Dixie Cook Book collected it in the 1880s, the practice had largely lapsed and the recipe was already a piece of remembered Americana. The heavy hand with soda and the overnight fermentation both belong to that earlier era, before reliable chemical baking powders made a rising dough unnecessary.