First Monday Ginger Cakes (the Williams family cook's)

History

This is the one recipe in "Dishes & Beverages of the Old South" (1913) that records the cook doing business on her own account. After the method — four eggs beaten light with coffee sugar, three cups of rich molasses, boiling water with soda, two tablespoonfuls of pounded ginger, five pints of flour rubbed with lard, kneaded firm, rolled half an inch thick, cut into big squares and baked in a quick oven, then brushed while "blazing hot" with butter, molasses and boiling water — Martha McCulloch-Williams adds: "These might properly be called First Monday Ginger Cakes, since our Mammy made them to sell upon that day to the crowds which came to court, thereby turning many an honest fip or picayune."

First Monday was court day, when crowds came into the county seat. A fip and a picayune were small coins of the period. What the sentence documents is a Black woman baking on her own initiative, selling to the public, and keeping what she earned. Foodymology uses the author's own alternative name for the cakes, because the heading she printed — "Mammy's Ginger Cakes" — is a household role-title rather than a name. McCulloch-Williams credits her white contributors by name throughout the volume, among them Betsy Vaughn, Leslie Fox, Aunt Polly Rives and Dorothy Dix; the woman who ran her family's kitchen and taught her to cook is never named in the book. Food historians have documented this as a convention of early-twentieth-century Southern cookbooks, in which Black cooks were credited as generic figures rather than named individuals.

McCulloch-Williams was a white writer born near Clarksville, Tennessee, who grew up on a plantation in the years before the Civil War. Her book's dedication reads, "So here's to our Mammys — God bless them! God rest them! This imperfect chronicle of the nurture wherewith they fed us is inscribed with love to their memory," and its opening holds that being "the best fed people in the world" let "we of the South Country... put up the best fight in history." That framing is the source's own and goes unexamined in it. Against it, this recipe's closing sentence is unusually concrete evidence of the cook's own enterprise, and it is preserved here for that reason.

Ingredients

• 4 eggs
• salt
• 1 cup coffee sugar
• 3 cups rich molasses
• 1 cup boiling water
• 2 teaspoonfuls baking soda
• 2 tablespoonfuls pounded ginger
• 5 pints flour
• 1 teaspoonful salt
• 2 cups sweet lard
• sweet milk
• butter
• molasses
• boiling water

Instructions

1. Beat four eggs very light with a good pinch of salt and a cup of coffee sugar. Add three cups of rich molasses and a cup of boiling water in which two teaspoonfuls of soda have been dissolved. Mix well.
2. Stir in two tablespoonfuls of pounded ginger. Sift five pints of flour with a teaspoonful of salt, then rub into it lightly two cups of sweet lard.
3. Add the molasses mixture to the flour and lard, and knead to a firm dough. Add more flour if needed to reach the right consistency, or if too stiff, add a little sweet milk.
4. Roll out the dough half an inch thick and cut into big squares. Bake in a quick oven.
5. While the cakes are blazing hot from the oven, brush the tops with a mixture of a little butter, molasses, and boiling water. Let stand in a warm place until dry.