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Cocoanut Gingerbread
A gill molasses, one and a half ounces sifted flour, one and a half ounces rice flour, one-quarter ounce powdered ginger, two ounces butter, one ounce grated cocoanut, two ounces powdered sugar and the rind of half a medium, sound lemon. Place in a saucepan on the fire the molasses and butter, and as soon as it comes to a boil add all the other materials, briskly stirring with a wooden spoon for five minutes. Then with a tablespoon drop the paste into a lightly buttered pastry tin, to the desired form of the cake. Place in a moderate oven to bake for twenty minutes. Remove, dress on a dish with a folded napkin and serve hot or cold.
These are drop gingerbread cakes rather than a loaf — a very small batch, closer to a chewy-crisp cookie than to what most people now call gingerbread. The weights are tiny and the proportions unusual, so measure rather than eyeball.
- A gill of molassesHalf a cup, about 4 fl oz. Use unsulphured cane molasses; blackstrap is harsher than what was meant here.
- The dry weights1½ oz flour is roughly ⅓ cup, 1½ oz rice flour about ⅓ cup loosely spooned, 2 oz powdered sugar about ½ cup, 2 oz butter is 4 tablespoons. A ¼ oz of powdered ginger is roughly 3½ to 4 teaspoons — assertive, but that is the point of the recipe.
- Rice flour is not optionalIt has no gluten and gives these drops their short, sandy crispness. Substituting all wheat flour produces a softer, cakier cookie.
- CocoanutOne ounce of freshly grated coconut, about ⅓ cup, unsweetened. Modern sweetened flake will push the sugar up and burn at the edges; unsweetened desiccated coconut is the nearest stand-in.
- The five minutes of stirringAdding the flours to the hot molasses and butter and beating hard thickens the mixture into a paste stiff enough to hold its shape when dropped; the fuller the mixing, the better it holds.
- Lemon rindZest only, from half a lemon — no white pith. Grate it fine and add it with the dry ingredients, off nothing hotter than the pan's own heat, so the oils stay in the batter.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350F. Drop the paste in small mounds, well spaced, on a buttered (or parchment-lined) tin. The recipe's twenty minutes suits larger mounds; smaller ones will be done sooner, when the surfaces look dry and set.
- Yield and coolingAbout a dozen to fifteen small cakes. Let them firm on the tin for a minute or two before lifting, or they tear; they crisp as they cool.
Filippini's book gathers dishes from hotel and restaurant kitchens — he published both The Table (1889) and The International Cook Book (1906) — and this belongs to the long family of English gingerbread "nuts" and drop gingerbreads — small, hard-spiced molasses cakes sold by the piece at fairs and kept in tins — rather than to the American loaf. Two things date it. Rice flour was a standard confectioner's ingredient for shortness and crispness, and is often said to have preceded cornstarch in that role in domestic baking, and grated coconut had by then become an everyday luxury in American cities as steamship traffic from the Caribbean made whole nuts cheap and commercial desiccated coconut appeared on grocers' shelves. The instruction to dress the cakes on a folded napkin is pure hotel service of the period, a standard dressing for small pastries on the platter.