Home › Dainty Dishes › Soft Ginger Bread (One heaping tablespoonful)
Soft Ginger Bread (One heaping tablespoonful)
One heaping tablespoonful of lard, beat to a cream and add one cupful of sugar and beat thoroughly; one wellbeaten egg, beat again well; one-half cup buttermilk or sour milk, one-half cup molasses, one heaping teaspoonful of ginger, one-fourth teaspoonful cinnamon, salt, two cupfuls of flour before sifting, one teaspoonful soda. Beat all together thoroughly and bake in moderate oven. For glaze: One-half cup brown sugar, one tablespoonful cream; stir together and boil until it rises to top of cup, flavor with vanilla, cool a little and spread over cake when it has become partly cooled.
A plain sour-milk gingerbread with a boiled brown sugar glaze. The recipe assumes you know the pan, the temperature and the time, so those are the gaps to fill.
- Oven and panA moderate oven is about 350F. Bake in a greased 8- or 9-inch square pan for 30 to 35 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean.
- The soda and the sour milkThe teaspoonful of soda is doing all the lifting, reacting with both the buttermilk and the molasses. Dissolve or sift it in last, and get the batter into the oven promptly, since the rise begins as soon as they meet.
- LardA heaping tablespoonful is roughly 20-25 g. Lard gives a tender, slightly savoury crumb; butter or shortening substitutes one for one, though butter browns the edges faster.
- Sour milkIf you have no buttermilk, stir a teaspoon of lemon juice or vinegar into half a cup of whole milk and let it stand ten minutes. Sweet milk alone leaves the molasses to do all the acidifying, and some soda may go unreacted, giving a soapy taste.
- MolassesUse unsulphured light or dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is markedly more bitter than ordinary table molasses and will overwhelm the spice.
- "Two cupfuls of flour before sifting"Measure the flour first, then sift; that is about 250 g.
- The glazeHalf a cup brown sugar with a tablespoon of cream is a very small quantity to boil. Use the smallest saucepan you have, stir until dissolved, then boil to a full rolling foam and let it cool briefly before spreading, or it will run off the cake entirely. It sets quickly, so work fast.
- YieldOne 8-inch square cake, nine to twelve pieces. Better on the second day, when the molasses has drawn moisture back through the crumb.
Soft gingerbread as opposed to hard gingerbread, the rolled and cut biscuit sold at fairs, is a cake in the American sense: baked in a pan, cut in squares, eaten with tea or in a lunch pail. Molasses did the sweetening work in these recipes long before it was a flavour choice, being cheap and always in the house, and the pairing of molasses with sour milk and soda is one of the workhorse chemical leavenings of nineteenth century baking, predating reliable commercial baking powder. The boiled brown sugar and cream glaze here is a small version of what would be called penuche or brown sugar frosting; boiling "until it rises to top of cup" is the sort of instruction that only makes sense to someone who has made it, and it suggests, though one can only guess, that these books were written for cooks already familiar with the method. The cake itself is thoroughly plain.