Soft Gingerbread to be baked in pans

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 account has it introduced to western Europe by eleventh-century crusaders returning from the eastern Mediterranean. The word itself first meant preserved ginger, and only in the fifteenth century did it attach to ginger-flavoured cakes. Hard gingerbread was a fairground sweet, cut into shapes and sold at fairs in England and France — 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 American chemical leaven that came 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.

Two things we could not stand behind. One is the story that a monk, Gregory of Nicopolis, carried gingerbread into Europe around 992. The other is a fuller picture of those medieval fairs — gilded kings and queens sold across four countries — which goes well beyond what we could confirm. Both we learned from popular reference and food-writing sources, and we were unable to locate the evidence they rest on.

Ingredients

• 3 pounds sugar
• 2 pounds butter
• 4 pounds flour
• 20 eggs
• 4 ounces ginger
• 4 spoons rose water

Instructions

1. Rub three pounds sugar and two pounds butter into four pounds flour.
2. Add twenty eggs, four ounces ginger, and four spoons rose water.
3. Bake as No. 1 (fifteen minutes).