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Ginger Bread
One cupful of molasses, one-half cupful of sugar, twothirds of a cup of butter, two teaspoonfuls of soda dissolved in water, one cupful of boiling water poured over the butter, one teaspoonful of ginger, two and one-half cupfuls of flour, two eggs well beaten and put in the last thing before putting in the dripping pan. Bake thirty minutes.
A wet-batter molasses gingerbread of the standard American type, poured thin and baked quickly. The original assumes you know the oven and the pan; here are the numbers it leaves out.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given; early cookbooks of this kind left the oven to the cook's judgement. Thirty minutes for a shallow molasses cake suggests something in the region of 350F. Molasses browns fast, so watch the edges after 25 minutes.
- The dripping panA dripping pan was the shallow rectangular roasting pan that sat under a joint. Use a 9x13-inch pan, greased and floured; the batter should go in no more than an inch deep or the center will not set in half an hour.
- Soda, not baking powderTwo teaspoons of soda is a lot, but it is reacting with a full cup of molasses, which is acidic. Do not substitute baking powder, and dissolve the soda in a tablespoon or two of water as directed so it disperses rather than leaving bitter specks.
- Order of operationsPour the boiling water over the butter to melt it, then combine with molasses and sugar and let the mixture cool to warm before the eggs go in. Boiling liquid poured onto beaten eggs will scramble them.
- Eggs lastThe instruction to add the eggs "the last thing" is the hinge. Once the soda meets the molasses the batter begins to rise; get it into the pan and into the oven promptly rather than letting it stand.
- MolassesUse unsulphured dark molasses. Blackstrap is more bitter than what this book meant and will dominate the single teaspoon of ginger.
- Spice levelOne teaspoon of ginger is restrained by modern taste. Ground ginger loses potency in the jar within a year, so if yours is old, increase it; a half teaspoon of cinnamon would not be out of place.
- YieldAbout 12 to 15 squares from a 9x13 pan. Best warm the day it is baked; the crumb is moist and keeps two or three days wrapped.
Molasses gingerbread was the everyday American cake of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, at a time when refined white sugar was costly and molasses arrived cheaply by the barrel from the West Indies. Its rise depended on the acidity of the molasses meeting an alkali, which is why older versions call for pearlash or saleratus and this one calls for soda: the chemical logic is identical, only the product on the shelf changed. The soft, poured, cake-like batter here is the American sense of the word, distinct from the stiff rolled and stamped English gingerbread of the same name.