ISSUE 63, ALL THINGS GINGER, Part 4: Old Fashioned Ginger Cake
Old Fashioned Ginger Cake
First let us note that the distinction between ginger cake and ginger bread is often imaginary in early American recipe books. But for most Americans there are definite associations that arise when one things of old fashioned ginger cake: it is thick with molasses, heavily spiced, and somewhat soft in texture. There was a “crisp” form of ginger cake that ran decidedly second in the favor of American households of the last half of the 19th century. The following recipe embodies what many people think of as “old style” ginger cake. It doesn’t have baking powder, but the old baking soda and sour milk combination to make the cake rise. This would have been a standard recipe from 1820-1860. It is printed in the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader on July 10, 1912:
New Orleans Molasses became a commodity in the northern United States in 1803. Molasses was the second heat reduction of sugar cane juice (cane syrup is the first), after a percentage of the sucrose has be percipitated out. Black Strap Molasses was a third heat reduction, quite bitter, and having virtually no sucrose in its body. It was viscous and pitchy black. The recipe does not indicate that it was sour milk or buttermilk in which the soda was dissolved. The serving of ginger cake with apple sauce was old school American home confectionry.
The name molasses has as its root “miel” a name for honey. Naming the foundational sweetener of western culture points to what old old fashioned gingerbread would be made of—ginger, flour, eggs, and honey. In Pennsylvania this older form of ginger cake survived among the Pennsylvania Dutch. In 1905 a Philadelphia paper published the recipe for “Dutch Ginger Cake”:
There is one obvious modern intrusion into what is essentially an ancient recipe—the heaping teaspoon of baking power. Baking powder only came into American baking culture after 1860s. The cake’s rise prior to this juncture was accomplished by the soda & sour milk/vinegar method, by yeast, or by the whipping of egg whites into an airy texture. The rest of the old instructions are there. Dutch Ginger Cake is a lighter, more refined, cake than the molasses cake described above.
The spicing is classic Old South: mace instead of the more expensive nutmeg; expensive ginger being bolstered by cinnamon. The incorporation of dried fruits tended to be more a holiday preparation than every day.