Recipe of the Month: Gingerbread Cake (1922)
The Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive holds more than 2,400 community cookbooks from across the United States, ranging in date from 1871 to 2021. This month’s blog post features two gingerbread cake recipes from The Cook Book of the Woman’s Club in Franklin, New Hampshire, published in 1922.
Gingerbread (No. 1) 1 cup sugar 1 teaspoonful salt (scant) 1 teaspoonful cinnamon ¼ teaspoonful nutmeg ¼ teaspoonful clove ¼ teaspoonful ginger 2 tablespoonfuls molasses 4 tablespoonfuls butter 1 egg 1 cup sour milk 2 cups flour 1 teaspoonful soda Sprinkle a small amount of sugar over the top, and bake forty-five minutes. Lena F. Burleigh
Gingerbread (No. 2), submitted by Ethel Woodman, provides even less information. In fact, it is only a list of ingredients, and no ginger at all!
Gingerbread (No. 2) ½ cup sugar ¼ cup butter or Crisco 1 egg ¼ teaspoonful cinnamon ¼ teaspoonful clove ½ cup molasses 1 ⅔ cups flour ¼ teaspoonful nutmeg ⅔ cup boiling water Ethel Woodman
I served both of these gingerbread cakes for Christmas dinner to a generally positive response. The intense molasses flavor and moistness of Gingerbread No. 2 made it the holiday winner, even in the absence of ginger! The really interesting thing about this is that Gingerbread No. 1 (includes ginger, but just 2 tbsp of molasses) did not read as “gingerbread” to the modern American palate (at least as represented in my household). Everyone felt it tasted more like a spice cake than what they expected from something titled gingerbread. So, based on this very small sample, molasses appears to be more essential to gingerbread than ginger!
