Home › Cakes, Puddings, and Pastry › Nuremberg Gingerbread
Nuremberg Gingerbread
Beat 4 eggs, add 1/2 a grated nutmeg, 6 cloves pounded, 2 ounces of candied peel chopped fine, 8 ounces sugar; mix all for 10 minutes, add slowly 1/2 pound flour, a pinch of salt, and a teaspoonful of baking powder, then 8 ounces of chopped sweet almonds. Stir all well, pour into tins 1/2 inch deep. Bake 1/2 hour, ice with chocolate, and cut into slices or strips.
This is a Lebkuchen-style batter with no butter or oil in it: the eggs are the only leavening of consequence, so the long beating at the start is the hinge of the recipe.
- Beat the eggs and sugar properlyTen minutes of mixing is not padding: with no fat in the batter, the aerated egg foam does much of the work of keeping the sheet from baking into a brick, alongside the teaspoonful of baking powder. A stand mixer on medium-high will get there in five to six minutes, when the mixture is pale and falls in a thick ribbon.
- Weights into cups8 oz sugar is about 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons granulated; 1/2 lb flour is about 1 3/4 cups scooped and levelled; 8 oz chopped almonds is roughly 1 3/4 cups. Weighing is easier and closer to the author's intent.
- Cloves and nutmegSix whole cloves ground yield a scant 1/4 teaspoon, and half a nutmeg grated is about 1 teaspoon. Both would have been bought whole; pre-ground jars are weaker, so lean toward a generous measure.
- Candied peel"Candied peel" here means citron, candied orange or lemon, or a mix. Chop it fine, as the recipe directs.
- Sweet almondsSimply almonds, as opposed to the bitter almonds also sold at the time. Blanched or skin-on both work; chop by knife rather than in a processor so they stay in flakes instead of turning to meal.
- Pan and depthHalf an inch deep means a sheet pan, not a cake tin — a quarter-sheet or 9x13 lined with parchment. The batter is thick and will need spreading with an offset spatula.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given. Bake at 350F, but start checking at 20 minutes: a half-inch egg sheet dries out fast, and it is done when the centre springs back and the edges just pull from the pan.
- Icing and cuttingIce while barely warm with a thin chocolate glaze or a warm ganache, then cut with a long knife once the glaze has set. Cutting cold and unglazed gives cleaner strips if you would rather ice each piece.
- YieldA 9x13 sheet cuts into roughly 30 fingers. They keep a week in a tin and, like most Lebkuchen, soften and improve after a day or two.
Nuremberg has been associated with spiced honey and nut cakes since the late Middle Ages, when the city sat on the pepper and spice routes north from Venice and had both a guild of Lebküchner and ready access to imported cloves, nutmeg and candied citron. What is offered here is a simplified, domesticated descendant: no honey, no rye, no wooden mould, and a teaspoon of baking powder standing in for the long-rested doughs and potash leavenings of the German bakeries. That substitution dates the recipe as much as anything — chemical baking powder was widely sold by the 1890s, and cookbooks of this period cheerfully used it to compress traditional recipes into a single afternoon. What remains is a German name attached to the very English instruction to ice with chocolate and cut into strips.