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Normandy Spice Cake or Gingerbread
This is the cake of the "gingerbread fairs," common in rural France. Warm 1 pint molasses, add 1/2 pound fresh butter, 1/2 ounce each of powdered ginger and allspice, a teaspoonful of mixed anise and coriander seed, and the rind of a lemon, grated. Add enough flour to make a dough, and set it to rise in a cool place, add then 2 ounces each of chopped cherries, citron, and currants or candied peel, roll out an inch thick, cut into rounds or squares, and bake in hot oven. It can be iced, if desired.
A pain d'épices dough written in the shorthand of a cook who already knew it: no flour quantity, no leavening, and a rising step that makes sense only in the older tradition of resting spiced dough for days or weeks. A few decisions have to be made before you start.
- The hinge: what "set it to rise" meansNo yeast and no chemical leavening is named, and molasses dough will not rise on its own overnight. In the old French practice a honey-and-flour pâte was left to mature for weeks, developing flavour rather than volume. If you want lift, treat this as a molasses batter and add about 2 teaspoons of baking soda, which the acid in the molasses will activate; if you follow the text literally, expect a dense, chewy, keeping cake.
- MolassesA pint is 2 cups, roughly 24 oz by weight. Use unsulphured cane molasses or dark treacle, not blackstrap, which is bitter at this proportion. Warming it only needs to loosen it, not heat it.
- Spice quantitiesHalf an ounce of ground ginger is about 2 1/2 to 3 tablespoons, and the same again of allspice. That is assertive even for gingerbread. Halving both gives something closer to modern taste.
- Anise and corianderA teaspoonful of the mixed seed, bruised in a mortar rather than left whole, so it perfumes the crumb instead of turning up as hard fragments.
- Flour, unstated"Enough flour to make a dough" is left to the cook, and with this much molasses and butter it will take a great deal: start at 5 to 6 cups (about 625-750 g) of plain flour and keep working more in until the mass is stiff enough to roll. Traditional pain d'epices often used rye for part of the flour, which suits the spicing.
- "Hot oven"Usually put at somewhere around 400-450F, but molasses and candied fruit scorch fast at that heat in an inch-thick cake. Bake at 350F for 20-30 minutes for rounds and judge by a firm, springy top.
- The fruitTwo ounces each is about 1/3 cup per item. Toss the chopped cherries, citron and currants in a little of the measured flour before working them in, or they sink and stick during cutting.
- Yield and finishingThe batch makes roughly two to three dozen 2-inch rounds. The recipe does not say what icing is meant; a plain water icing -- sifted icing sugar slaked with a spoonful or two of lemon juice, brushed on while the cakes are barely warm -- suits it. Kept in a tin, they improve for several days.
Pain d'epices is the French branch of the honey-and-spice cake family that runs through medieval Europe, and the "gingerbread fairs" the author invokes were real fixtures of the calendar: the Parisian foire aux pains d'epices, held around Easter and generally traced back to the fairs of the Abbey of Saint-Antoine, along with countless smaller provincial versions where the cake was sold in cut squares, sometimes stamped or iced, as fairground food. Dijon and Reims were the celebrated centres of the trade. The use of molasses here rather than honey suggests an adaptation for readers who could buy treacle cheaply; the resting of the dough, unexplained in the text, may be the surviving trace of the old commercial method in which spiced dough was matured for weeks before baking.