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Gingerbread
1 cup sour milk 1¾ teaspoons soda 1 cup molasses 2¼ teaspoons ginger 2 cups flour 1 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons melted butter Mix soda with sour milk and add to molasses. Sift together flour, ginger and salt, combine two mixtures, add butter; bake in greased pan in moderate oven 350°F. twenty-five minutes.
A plain molasses gingerbread of the sour-milk school, leavened entirely by the reaction between soda and acid. It works, but two of its ingredients no longer mean what they did.
- Sour milkThis means raw milk left to clabber, not spoiled pasteurised milk, which simply rots. Substitute a cup of buttermilk, or a cup of milk with a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar stirred in and left five minutes.
- The soda is the hingeWith 1½ teaspoons of soda against one cup each of sour milk and molasses, the acid is what makes the batter rise. Mix the wet and dry parts only until combined and get it into the oven promptly, since the gas begins escaping as soon as they meet.
- MolassesUse unsulphured light or dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is much more bitter than the ordinary table molasses this sort of recipe assumed. Some cooks find sorghum syrup closer in flavour to the older product than blackstrap is.
- Pan sizeThe recipe names none. Two cups of flour and two cups of liquid fill an 8-inch square pan to a shallow depth, which is what the 25-minute bake assumes; a 9-inch round works as well.
- OvenThe book already gives 350F alongside 'moderate oven'. Test with a skewer in the centre at 25 minutes and expect up to 30 in a heavier pan.
- Sweetness and fatThere is no sugar and only two tablespoons of butter, so this bakes up dark, moist and closer to a quick bread than to a modern cake. It is usually served warm, plain or with butter, and it keeps a couple of days wrapped.
- YieldAbout nine squares from an 8-inch pan.
Sour-milk gingerbread belongs to the long American tradition of molasses cakes leavened chemically rather than with yeast or eggs, a habit that spread once saleratus and then commercial baking soda became cheap in the mid-nineteenth century. Molasses remained a common household sweetener into the early twentieth century and was often cheaper than refined sugar, and ginger was among the spices a modest kitchen was likely to keep. The Metropolitan Cook Book was issued by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and distributed free to policyholders, part of a wider corporate campaign of the period to promote thrift and household health; its recipes are deliberately economical, using ingredients a family would have on hand, and it gives oven temperatures in degrees as well as the older 'moderate oven' wording.