ISSUE 43, CHRISTMAS, Part 3: Molly Saunders's Gingerbread
New England's Most Legendary Gingerbread
New England’s Most Legendary Gingerbread
In 1855 newspapers throughout New England erupted with remembrances of Molly Saunders’s “Top Shelf” Gingerbread, a confection of 1800 Salem that drew lovers of sweetness from Boston. [“Molly Saunders’s Gingerbread,” Boston Evening Transcript (August 13, 1855), 2.]Molly Saunders prepared two varieties of gingerbread for sale at her premises and shop on Central Avenue, Salem: top shelf (with butter) and bottom shelf (sans butter). “Both were baked in tins about 5 inches long and 1 ½ inch wide, with longitundinal crease in the center.” {“Molly Saunders’s Gingerbread,” Salem Register (September 13, 1855), 1. In 1887 Salem historian Marianne Silsbee recalled the way she viewed Saunder’s shop when a girl: “In a small shop on Central Street was a door, half wood, half glass, such as were formerly so universal, and the children could peep at the destined feast before lifting the latch, thereby tinkling a bell to give notice of a customer” A Half Century in Salem (1887), 67.
One newspaper correspondent, assuring the public, that he possessed a recipe from the Saunders family archive, published the following formula:
Molly Saunders’s Upper Shelf
3 ½ lbs flour, 1 lb. butter, 1 qt sugar baker’s molasses, I table spoonful saleratus dissolved in warm water, ginger to taste. [Knocker’s Hole, “The Lost Art,” Boston Evening Transcript (September 11, 1855). 1.]
I wonder about this recipe; I puzzle about the bicarbonate of soda (saleratus) in the mix; it was not generally available until 1819 in New England, making it unlikely that it appeared in the original recipes when Saunders experienced her Heyday. So this is a latter day family recipe at best, an invention of the 1850s at the worst. I wondered whether the first recipe had yeast, or honey instead of molasses.
At any rate, Molly Saunders’s Gingerbread evolved in Salem foodways over the last half of the 19th century, so when a cookbook, What Salem Dames Cooked, was published by the city’s women in 1910, it contained recipes for both the Top Shelf and Bottom Shelf, although the Bottom Shelf recipe contained butter in direct defiance of the initial remembrances of the variety.
Molly Saunders’s may be a folk figure. There are a number of recipes attributed to her, all improbably. On March 11, 1937 the New Orleans States presented “Molly’s Pound Cake” as her “Upper Shelf Cake: ”One cup butter, 1 cup granulated sugar, 2 cups flour, 11/2 teaspoon of mace, 5 eggs, 1 tablespoon brandy, and 1 more tablespoon of brandy to pour over the cake after baking” (30). A Salem MA baker has a following in Louisiana 125 after she sold her cakes? Interesting.
A Final Note: Saunders had a rival in the pastry arts in Salem, the African American baker Patience Freeman (1737-1817), daughter of African Plato Whipple.