When it comes to holiday desserts, a warm piece of gingerbread is guaranteed to tickle your palate. Plain, sprinkled with powdered sugar or topped with lemon curd, gingerbread is one of those simple and spicy delights that sends your taste buds into overdrive. The essential ingredient is ginger, the edible root of a flowering plant that humans have been cultivating for about 7,000 years.
This ancient spice from Southeast Asia has been a popular ingredient in both cuisine and in medicine. A highly sought-after trade item, ginger was transported from East to West via the Silk Road. A truly expensive commodity at the time, only the wealthy Roman, Greek and Egyptian households could partake of it. Ancient Egyptians baked a spiced ginger-honey bread during religious ceremonies and as offerings to their gods. Wealthy Greeks and Romans enjoyed a gingered honey cake as both an aphrodisiac and as a stomach physick after a night of wining and dining.
Ginger may have arrived in Britain as far back as the Anglo-Saxon period, either brought to the island by Romans during their occupation or by Crusaders returning home from the Middle East in the eleventh century. However it arrived, incorporating it into cakes and sweets was very popular throughout Medieval Britain and Northern Europe.
As a harvested root, preserved ginger traveled several hundred miles from Asia before reaching European markets. A single pound of ginger cost as much as an entire sheep. Cooks and pastry chefs of royalty and the wealthy experimented with the costly spice in an effort to show off their patron’s wealth. Britain’s famous bard, William Shakespeare, spoke of gingerbread in one of his early comedies, Love’s Labour’s Lost: “An I had but one penny in the world, thou shouldst have it to buy gingerbread ...”
In Shakespeare’s day, gingerbread consisted of ground almonds, stale breadcrumbs, rosewater, sugar and ginger. The result was a thick paste pressed into wooden molds carved into the likenesses of kings, queens, emperors and various religious symbols. For those who could afford an additional luxury, the finished ginger cookie was decorated with edible gold leaf or boiled white icing to bring out the details of the mold relief.
The first documented use of the word “gingerbread” didn’t describe the crisp cookies or moist cakes we love today. The name derives from the word “gingerbras,” meaning any kind of preserved ginger. A mid-fifteenth-century English cookbook refers to “gyngerbrede,” a confection made with ginger and other spices boiled with breadcrumbs and honey. By the sixteenth century, the English had replaced the stale breadcrumbs with flour, added eggs and sweeteners, creating a lighter confection. It was Elizabeth I who is credited with the first gingerbread men, often presenting visiting dignitaries with their own baked likenesses tied up with ribbon. As more and more trade routes opened, the speed and method of transportation improved. Also, as Europeans began planting ginger in Africa and the Americas, the price of ginger declined. Now it was available to the rising European middle class, and gingerbread became readily available at fetes and fairs. Entire festivals, called Gingerbread Fairs, centered on this sweet treat.
Throughout Europe, seventeenth-century bakers were gathered into professional baker guilds, with gingerbread bakers a distinct subset. Only professional gingerbread bakers were permitted to bake it, except at Christmas and Easter when anyone was allowed to do so. Gingerbread was sold in specialty shops and at seasonal markets and was typically cut out into shapes of hearts, stars, animals, trumpets and soldiers. Decorated gingerbread was given as presents to adults at holidays and weddings and also worn as talismans against evil by men going into battle.
Photo courtesy of The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.
Although several European countries had highly skilled bakers, Germany was and still is considered the center of gingerbread artistry. The city of Nuremberg was known as the “Gingerbread Capital of the World” and remains famous to this day. The city became best known for its ginger cookie called lebkuchen, soft cookies cut out into fantastically decorated shapes and figures. The oldest recorded recipe from the sixteenth century is kept in the Germanic National Museum in Nuremberg.
There’s a darker side to gingerbread than just the rich molasses used in today’s recipes. The crafting of gingerbread houses has been around since the sixteenth century but rose in prominence following the publication of the Brothers Grimm fairytale, Hansel and Gretel. In this dark tale, a wicked witch lures two abandoned children into her cottage made entirely of gingerbread and frosted decorations, with the intent of roasting them in her oven.
Master bakers embraced the concept of gingerbread houses, which soon made seasonal appearances in their shop windo
ws. To hold up structurally, they were created with a stiffer dough and reinforced with foil and gold leaf. With the advent of sugar icings and frostings, gingerbread houses became confectionery wonders. So elaborate were the architectural features that later the carved architectural details found on many Victorian homes are referred to as gingerbread.
In a May 1875 issue of St. Nicholas Magazine, a folktale about a living gingerbread man or boy appeared in print. In the story, a childless woman bakes a gingerbread man, who leaps from her oven and runs away. The woman and her husband give chase but are unable to catch him. The gingerbread man then outruns several farm workers and animals, only to meet his demise in the jaws of a red fox. The tale, often repeated with several variations, contains the taunting lines, “Run, run as fast as you can! You can’t catch me. I’m the Gingerbread Man!” Gingerbread men have since been featured in Broadway musicals, author L. Frank Baum’s Oz books, music lyrics, television and animated films, most with grim outcomes for the feckless runaway.
It’s unclear how gingerbread came to be associated with Christmas. The Medieval belief that ginger and similar spices had a warming effect on the body and were used to treat seasonal maladies like colds and stomach flu, led to gingerbread becoming a winter treat. The tradition of Christmas gingerbread arrived in North America with the early colonists. Gingerbread cookies were used to bribe voters during elections to Virginia’s House of Burgesses. George Washington’s mother had her own favorite recipe, and one of Thomas Jefferson’s favorite desserts was a soft ginger cake made with treacle molasses.
According to Keith Nickerson, Colonial Williamsburg’s Director of Culinary Historic Area, “Colonial Williamsburg started making our ginger cakes at the commissary in the 1970s. Over time it became so popular that it became more mainstream in the historic area. In 2011, we re-opened the Raleigh Tavern Bakery, and that’s when they started the interpretation piece, where a baker actually bakes the soft ginger cake in the Colonial style. During the holidays, we make Fat Men, giant gingerbread men, a recipe variation of our famous ginger cake.” Nickerson shares their traditional ginger cake recipe with us.
“It’s a good recipe that is a cross between a gingersnap and a soft cookie. The amount of spice gives them a good bite. Try them with ice cream for a special treat.” From their oven to yours, enjoy the redolence of rich spices and long-ago holiday memories.
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY RECIPE
Take three pounds of flour, one pound of sugar, one pound of butter rubbed in very fine, two ounces of ginger beat fine, one large nutmeg grated, then take a pound of treacle, a quarter of a pint of cream, make them warm together, and make up the bread stiff; roll it out, and make it up into thin cakes, cut them out with a teacup, or small glass; or roll them out like nuts, and bake them on tin plates in a slack oven.
~ Glasse, Hannah, The Art Of Cookery Made Plain And Simple, 1796
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY VERSION
Note: This recipe can be halved to make it workable in most kitchens.
Ingredients:
• 1 1/2 pounds all-purpose unbleached flour
• 1/2 pound sugar
• 1/2 pound butter softened to room temperature
• 2 tablespoons ground ginger
• 1 tablespoon ground nutmeg
• 1 cup molasses
• 1/4 cup cream
Directions:
Preheat oven to 375 degrees. In a large mixing bowl, blend the flour, sugar and spices thoroughly with your hands. Warm the molasses and cream together in a small saucepan, stirring to blend. This is not to be hot but warm so that they blend together, not cook. Work the butter into the flour mixture with your hands until it has a sort of grated bread look. Add the molasses and cream mixture and work it up into a stiff dough with your hands. If it seems dry, add a little more cream to it. The dough should be stiff but not dry.
Roll out the dough on a floured surface about 1/4-inch thick and cut cookies into whatever shapes please you. If you wish to form them into nut shapes as the recipe (Eighteenth-Century Recipe) states, they will look sort of button-shaped when they bake. Bake these in a 375-degree oven for about 8 to 10 minutes. They should still be soft to the touch before they come from the oven, not hard.
Should you become inspired to try a hand at creating your own gingerbread house, the 2014 Guinness Book of World Records documents the largest house made to date by the Traditions Club of Bryan, Texas, 60 feet long, 42 feet wide and ten feet tall, with 4,000 handmade gingerbread bricks, 1,800 pounds of butter and 1,080 ounces of ground ginger. Visitors were in awe. In the true keeping of the Christmas spirit, donations were made to the St. Joseph’s Hospital.