HFF 4.23: Comfort Food

The Challenge: Comfort Food--make a dish that's comforting to eat or comfortable to make.

The Recipe: Poor Man's Gingerbread from Dr. Chase's Third, Last, and Complete Receipt Book and Home Physician

Gingerbread, Poor Man's--Molasses, 1 cup; sugar, 1/2 cup; 1 egg; buttermilk, 2/3 cup; lard or butter, 1 table-spoonful; ginger, 1 table-spoonful; cinnamon, 1 tea-spoonful; soda, 1 tea-spoonful; flour, 2 cups. "A.Y.E." of O'Brien, Iowa, says of it "Good and very cheap. [See, also, "Poor Man's Cake."] 

New recipe, but gingerbread was my first solo foray into period cooking, so it always feels a bit like coming home.

The Date/Year and Region: 1887, Detroit, Michigan

How Did You Make It: Here's a book that doesn't even bother to tell you to "make in the usual fashion"--you get an ingredient list and maybe some anecdotes about how good the editor is at assessing new recipes. That's only a slight exaggeration.

I mixed the ginger, cinnamon, sugar, and molasses together, added the egg and butter, dissolved the soda in the buttermilk and added it, then finished by mixing in the flour. The soda and buttermilk reacted enough to get some bubbles going; the mixture ended up making a moderately viscous batter.

I baked the gingerbread in a glass loaf pan at 350F for ~35-40 minutes (I did 15, but lost track of the times I added 5 minutes since the center would not set). [Edited to add: I tried a second batch, to use up that buttermilk, and baked it for  ~ 1 hour at 325F with parchment paper lining the loaf pan. It cooked through as before, without the edges getting overdone.]

Time to Complete: On the order of 50 minutes to mix and bake.

Total Cost: About $7 for buttermilk and molasses, though I could get three batches of gingerbread out of those quantities.

How Successful Was It?: Tastes just like my family's Christmas cookies: molasses and ginger and cinnamon. The texture of this gingerbread is soft and fairly moist--almost a little too much, so, as though the center didn't quite cook through. The edges were starting to overcook when I pulled it, so next time I'm tempted to line the pan with parchment paper and try for a longer bake. Or maybe just put it into a larger pan so it's less thick; I observe that one recipe-batch does neatly fill a loaf pan.

How Accurate Is It?: I'm not sure how modern buttermilk compares to traditional, but I didn't make any intentional substitutions or notice any unintentional errors.

Tasty on its own or with tea.