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Ginger Nuts
Mrs. H. Baird.
One and three-quarters pounds of syrup, one pound of moist sugar, one pound of butter, two and three-quarters pounds of flour, one and a-half ounces of ground ginger, one and a-half ounces of allspice, one and a-half ounces of coriander seed, salvolatile size of a bean, a little cayenne, flour enough to roll out but not thin, cut with a wineglass or roll between your hands into small balls and pinch.
A British-style ginger nut in bulk: nearly seven pounds of dough, leavened not with soda but with baker's ammonia. Read the notes on salvolatile and on scaling before you start.
- Salvolatile is baker's ammoniaSal volatile here means ammonium carbonate (hartshorn), sold today as baker's ammonia and still used for crisp Northern European biscuits. A piece "the size of a bean" is roughly 1/4 teaspoon crushed to powder for this quantity of dough. It must be crushed fine and dissolved into the wet mixture or it leaves bitter pockets.
- It will smell of ammoniaThe dough and the oven will smell sharply of ammonia; that is normal, and it bakes off from thin, dry biscuits. It does not bake off reliably from thick, soft cakes, which is why ammonia is used for nuts and snaps and not for sponge. Ventilate and do not underbake.
- Syrup and moist sugar"Syrup" here almost certainly means a treacle-type sugar syrup rather than corn syrup, which was not yet a household article; golden syrup as a branded product post-dates this book, and maple cannot be ruled out in an Ontario kitchen. "Moist sugar" is soft light brown sugar, the grade that had not been dried and loaf-hardened.
- Scale it downAs written this is about 6 3/4 lb of dough before the extra rolling flour, several hundred biscuits. Quartering gives a workable batch: 7 oz syrup, 4 oz brown sugar, 4 oz butter, 11 oz flour, and about 3/8 oz -- roughly a tablespoon and a half -- of each of ginger, allspice and coriander.
- The spices are ground, and there are a lotFour and a half ounces of spice to under three pounds of flour is a strong, dark, peppery biscuit by modern standards. Coriander seed must be ground, not whole. The cayenne is a genuine pinch, for heat at the back of the throat rather than flavour.
- No oven temperature is givenBake at 350F. Ginger nuts spread a little and then set; 10 to 14 minutes depending on size, until the tops have cracked and the edges are firm. They crisp as they cool, so pull them while the centres still give slightly.
- A wineglass cutterA Victorian wineglass rim is small, roughly 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 inches across, and was used upside down as a cutter. The alternative in the text, rolling small balls and pinching them, gives the traditional knobbly nut.
- Mixing method, unstatedWarm the syrup, sugar and butter together until the butter melts, cool to blood heat, dissolve the ammonia in a spoonful of water and stir it in, then work in the flour and spices.
Ginger nuts came to Canadian and American kitchens straight from Britain, where hard spiced gingerbread sold by the piece at fairs and markets was one of the oldest commercial baked goods; "nut" is often said to describe the small pinched or moulded shape rather than any nut in the dough. The heavy hand with allspice and coriander, and the pinch of cayenne, mark this as an older style than the ginger-only cookies that followed. Baker's ammonia was one of the raising agents used for such biscuits before chemical baking powders were widely trusted, alongside pearlash and saleratus, and it was bought at the druggist as sal volatile, the same volatile salt sold for smelling bottles. The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto in 1877 from recipes contributed by named local women and sold to raise money for the Hospital for Sick Children, which is why Mrs. H. Baird's name stands at the head of the receipt.