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Soft Gingerbread
Mrs. Ted Thomas.
One pint molasses, five eggs, one coffee cup sour milk, one butter, one tablespoon ginger, one tablespoon soda, flour to thicken; bake in a long tin.
A community-cookbook gingerbread written in the shorthand of a cook who already knew what the batter should look like. The measurements are by cup and pint rather than weight, and the flour is left entirely to your judgement.
- Translate the measuresA pint of molasses is 2 cups. A "coffee cup" in receipts of this period is usually read as roughly a standard 8 oz cup, though actual cups varied. "One butter" most likely carries over the preceding measure, i.e. one coffee cup of butter, about 8 oz, softened -- but the recipe leaves that to inference.
- Flour to thickenThe original gives no quantity because the cook judged by eye. Expect roughly 5 to 6 cups of all-purpose flour for a batter that is thick but still pours slowly off the spoon. Add it gradually and stop while the batter is still soft; this is meant to be soft gingerbread, not a stiff dough.
- The soda is the hingeA tablespoon of soda against 2 cups of molasses and a cup of sour milk is not unreasonable given the acid load, and period saleratus or soda was weaker and less pure than modern bicarbonate. Even so, a full modern tablespoon of fine baking soda can push toward a soapy edge and a dark, coarse crumb; if you would rather be safe, scale back toward 2 teaspoons.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured raw milk, not spoiled pasteurized milk. Use buttermilk, cup for cup; it supplies the acid the soda needs.
- Salt and spiceNo salt is listed, which is usual in receipts written this tersely; salted butter may well have been assumed. If your butter is unsalted, add a teaspoon. A tablespoon of ginger is right for this quantity, and a teaspoon of cinnamon or a grating of nutmeg is period-appropriate if you want more depth.
- A long tinA shallow rectangular pan, roughly a modern 9x13 or a rimmed jelly-roll pan for a thinner cake. Grease and line it; molasses batters stick hard.
- Oven and timeThe recipe gives no oven guidance; 350F is a reasonable modern setting for a molasses cake. In a 9x13 allow 35 to 45 minutes, testing with a straw or skewer at the center; molasses cakes look set well before they are done and sink if pulled early.
- YieldAbout 16 squares from a 9x13. It keeps better than most cakes, and the flavor improves on the second day once the molasses and ginger settle.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Chicago in the 1870s and sold for charity, and it belongs to the first wave of American community cookbooks in which each receipt carries a contributor's name, Mrs. Ted Thomas here among them. Soft gingerbread, as distinct from the hard rolled and cut gingerbread of earlier centuries, was a staple of that kind of book: molasses was the cheapest sweetener in the American kitchen, ginger kept indefinitely, and the pairing of sour milk with saleratus or soda gave reliable lift in the decades before commercial baking powder became universal. The absence of a flour quantity and of any oven temperature is not carelessness but the ordinary convention of the period, when a cook judged batter by feel and heat by the way her hand or a scrap of paper behaved in the oven.