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Gingerbread
Miss L. Stagman.
One cup of butter, one cup of sugar, two cups of molasses, five and one-half cups of flour, six eggs, one cup of buttermilk, ginger and cinnamon essences to taste, and one dessertspoonful of soda.
A large, molasses-heavy gingerbread of the sort baked in a sheet and cut in squares. The list gives no method, no pan and no oven, so the working details below matter more than usual.
- The hinge: don't overmix once the flour is inWith six eggs, buttermilk and two cups of molasses, this is a soft batter cake, not a stiff dough. Cream the butter and sugar, beat in the eggs, then add the molasses and buttermilk alternately with the flour and stop as soon as it comes together.
- Scale and panFive and a half cups of flour plus a quart or so of wet ingredients is a very large batch — on the order of 5 lb of batter. Use a half-sheet pan (13x18 in) or two 9x13 pans, buttered and lined; it will overflow anything smaller.
- OvenThe recipe gives none. A moderate oven, around 350F, suits it. A half-sheet will take about 30-40 minutes, deeper pans 45-55, until the centre springs back and a skewer comes out clean. Molasses browns fast, so judge doneness by the middle, not the edges.
- Dessertspoonful of sodaA dessertspoon is between a teaspoon and a tablespoon — reckon it at 2 teaspoons. That is enough to work with both the buttermilk and the acid in the molasses; more will leave a soapy, metallic taste.
- "Ginger and cinnamon essences"These were alcohol-based flavouring extracts sold by grocers and druggists. Ground spices do the same job here: start with 1 tablespoon ground ginger and 2 teaspoons cinnamon for this quantity of flour, and add more if you want it sharper.
- MolassesUse unsulphured dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter. Sorghum syrup, common in nineteenth-century American kitchens, works if you have it.
- ButtermilkCultured buttermilk from a carton is thicker than the old churn liquid, and behaves correctly with the soda. Thin it slightly with milk if the batter seems tight.
- SaltThe recipe gives no salt of its own, and butter of the period was usually salted. If you bake with unsalted butter, add about a teaspoon and a half.
- YieldAbout 24 generous squares. It keeps better than most cakes — wrapped, the flavour deepens for two or three days.
Gingerbread in nineteenth-century American cookbooks divides into two families: the hard, rolled, cut-out kind and the soft molasses cake baked in a pan, of which this is a straightforward example. Both depended on molasses, which was cheaper than refined sugar for most of the century, and on the pairing of sour milk or buttermilk with saleratus or soda to raise a batter too heavy and too acidic for yeast. Recipes of this kind often reached print through subscription cookbooks assembled from contributions by named local women, which is why this reads as a bare list of proportions — Miss Stagman was writing down what she already knew by hand for neighbours who also knew how to mix a cake. The call for ginger and cinnamon "essences" rather than ground spice is a small period detail: bottled flavouring extracts had been sold commercially in America from the 1840s onward, and were available to cooks who might otherwise have had to grind whole spice themselves.