Butter drop ditto

History

Amelia Simmons's American Cookery gives not one gingerbread but five, and their range is the point. The first, a molasses gingerbread, is a stiff dark dough spiced with cinnamon and coriander or allspice, kneaded until it will roll and cut, its top washed with beaten whites and sugar. The four that follow are richer 'butter and sugar' cakes: one kneaded stiff and shaped to fancy, a soft version baked in pans on twenty eggs, a small butter-drop, and a boldly spiced cake carrying a full quarter-pound of ginger. Between them they run nearly the whole width of what the word 'gingerbread' could mean, from a crisp rolled biscuit to a soft, cake-like loaf.

That width is old. Gingerbread descends from the spiced, honey-sweetened confections of the medieval European kitchen, built on ginger, a root first cultivated in Asia and carried west along the spice routes; one tradition credits its arrival in Europe to the monk Gregory of Nicopolis around 992, while returning crusaders are also said to have brought it home from the eastern Mediterranean. The word itself first meant preserved ginger and only attached to ginger-flavored cakes in the fifteenth century. At medieval fairs across England, France, Holland and Germany, hard gingerbread was cut into animals, kings and queens and sometimes gilded with gold leaf, the shaping tradition Simmons echoes when she tells the cook to 'shape it to your fancy.'

What marks the American version is molasses. Cheaper than sugar, it became a common sweetener and produced a softer, darker cake, and it is molasses that carries Simmons's first entry while sugar carries the other four. Her doughs are raised with pearl ash, an early chemical leaven before baking soda, dissolved here in water or in cream. Rose water perfumes three of the four sugar cakes. Together the five stand as a snapshot of late-eighteenth-century American gingerbread, not yet settled into a single form.

The book does not say which of the five its author favored, why molasses claimed one entry and sugar the rest, or on what tables or occasions any of them appeared. Those preferences the record does not keep; what it keeps is the spread of the forms themselves.

Ingredients

• 1/4 pound butter
• 1 pound sugar
• mace
• 1 1/4 pounds flour
• 4 eggs
• 1 glass rose water

Instructions

1. Rub a quarter pound butter and one pound sugar, sprinkled with mace, into one and a quarter pounds flour.
2. Add four eggs and one glass rose water.
3. Bake as No. 1 (fifteen minutes).