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Soft Ginger Bread (One cupful brown sugar one)
One cupful brown sugar, one cupful New Orleans molasses, three-fourths of a cupful of butter, two eggs, one cupful of sour milk, a good full teaspoonful soda, three and a half cupfuls flour, two teaspoonfuls ginger, one of cinnamon.
A complete ingredient list with no method and no oven, which was normal for a book written for cooks who already knew how gingerbread went together. The proportions are sound; everything missing is procedure.
- The hinge: sour milk and sodaThe soda is the only leavening, and it works by reacting with the acid in the sour milk and molasses. Mix the batter and get it into the oven promptly — the lift begins as soon as the two meet and will not wait.
- Sour milkThis meant naturally soured raw milk, thick and tangy. Buttermilk is the closest supermarket stand-in, cup for cup; failing that, stir a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar into a cup of whole milk and let it stand ten minutes.
- New Orleans molassesUnsulphured cane molasses of medium strength, not blackstrap. Blackstrap is more bitter and more acidic and will throw both the flavour and the soda balance off. Ordinary light or dark unsulphured molasses is right.
- Butter measureThree-fourths of a cupful is 12 tablespoons, or 170 g. Period butter was usually salted; if using unsalted, add half a teaspoon of salt, which the recipe omits entirely.
- Method, since none is givenCream the butter with the brown sugar, beat in the eggs, then the molasses. Add the flour and spices alternately with the sour milk, with the soda dissolved in a little of the milk, and beat only until smooth.
- OvenNo oven or temperature is given anywhere in the recipe; 350F suits a cake of this composition. Soft gingerbread with this much molasses browns quickly at the edges, so check the centre with a skewer rather than going by colour.
- Pan and timingThe batter fills a 9 x 13 inch pan; expect roughly 35 to 40 minutes, or 25 to 30 in two 8-inch squares. It cuts into about 16 generous squares.
- Serving"Soft" gingerbread was meant to be eaten warm from the pan, plainly or with whipped cream or applesauce. It keeps well covered for several days and improves on the second day as the spice settles.
Soft gingerbread — as opposed to the hard, rolled, cut gingerbread cakes that go back to medieval fairs — is the American molasses cake of the nineteenth-century kitchen, and it appears in household manuals of the period in many variations. Its rise is tied to two cheap staples: cane molasses shipped north from Louisiana and the Caribbean, and the chemical leavening that arrived in ordinary kitchens over the middle of the century as saleratus and then as purified baking soda. Before that, the sour-milk-and-soda pairing was the practical answer to a household with milk that had turned and no yeast sponge going. The specification of "New Orleans" molasses is a quality note rather than a geographical fussiness: it distinguished the lighter, sweeter table syrup from the harsher refinery leavings sold for stock feed and rum. It is not a plain everyday bake but a modest treat, spiced, buttery and rich with eggs.