G is for Gingerbread. Very Very Old Gingerbread

 

Spoiler Alert: here's how it turned out!

Ok, it's not the gingerbread that's old, it's the recipe. this is an adaptation of an adaptation of a 14th or 15th century gingerbread recipe.

to find out what possessed me to do this, check out this post.

RECIPE FIRST, ESSAY SECOND

2-3 slices of bread to make 1 cup soft breadcrumbs

1/4 cup honey

1 tsp ground ginger

1/4 tsp red sandlewood

1/4 tsp ground white pepper

pinch of nutmeg

pinch of cardamom

1) cut the crusts from 2-3 slices of bread. chop/tear the bread into small pieces.

2) put honey in small saucepan and bring to a boil. I did this on medium heat.

3) add breadcrumbs to the honey, lower the heat, and stir and squish until the crumbs are “dissolved.” 

4) remove from heat and stir in the spices.

5) dump out onto a kneading surface and let cool until safe to handle.

6) knead until the constancy of marzipan (or playdough). 

6.5) if making as a dessert, divide into several bite size balls and roll those in sugar. 

7) cool completely.

i’ve got to admit, when i first read this recipe i was a little confused and not terribly enthused. honestly i think that’s part of what stalled this project for so long. i was afraid i would go to the trouble of making this and find it super gross, thus wasting both time and food. to be fair, the recipe does not seem very “normal” as far as modern baking of gingerbread goes. for instance, there’s no flour. and also, oh hey yeah, there’s no BAKING. however, this year for me has become a sort of Finally Do This Thing or Archive It adventure. so here we are.

Oh look, it's mise en place! thanks Food Network.

I used Oroweat 12 Grain for the breadcrumbs.
3 slices wound up being overkill, but I just added the leftover crumbs (and the crusts) to my breadcrumb bag. I make meatloaf fairly regularly, so they won't go to waste.

Honey is really impressive when it boils, which I should have remembered from watching the Great British Bake Off.

I decided this looked "dissolved" enough for the breadcrumbs.
This part of the process was really more squishing than stirring.

Adding the spices gave this a really pretty color and a lovely smell. Warning that the kneading portion was an extremely sticky undertaking. I thought adding flour would mess things up, so I just went with it. If I make this again, I might try buttering my hands?

And this is how it turned out. The recipe I had actually has you making the gingerbread as part of another dish, but also suggests what you can do to make it more of a dessert. So I decided to go half and half on that and just happened to have some cute multi colored sugar sprinkles to roll the dessert balls in.

I’m happy to share the fact that my fears were not reality. this actually turned out pretty tasty. sweet and full of nice bitey warming spices (suck it, oliver cromwell). based on how it turned out, i feel like our closest modern equivalent might be a cake pop?

(although what this recipe personally reminds me most of is a bizarre snack I used to make for myself when I was a kid. I would take a slice of white bread and tear off the crusts. then I would pour sugar into the middle of the bread and squish the whole thing together until it resembled a large dough ball. it was sweet and delicious and not even remotely good for me, i’m sure. a snack only undertaken when under the unwatchful eye of an inattentive babysitter. sorry mom.) 

so where did this recipe come from? welp, i have a cookbook called Ye Bors Hede Boke of Cookry (which is super fun if you’ve ever been interested in cooking medieval english recipes) and it adapted a gingerbread recipe from a 14th or 15th manuscript, BL MS Sloane 221. interestingly this recipe doesn’t have its own page, but is a footnote to another recipe, a savory chicken dish that calls for the inclusion of gingerbread. i’m debating with myself whether or not i have the gumption to go ahead and make _that_ recipe now that i have some period appropriate gingerbread to hand.

i did some adapting on the recipe because, well, a of all) i’ve yet to encounter the recipe i don’t want to tweak a bit (shrug). but secondly, two of the ingredients called for were not already in my kitchen, and buying spices online winds up being kind of a commitment, due to the amounts. 

The ingredients in question were red sandlewood and long pepper. after reading about them a bit, I decided I was up for getting the red sandlewood (used mostly for color, and also an ingredient in the gingerbread chicken dish that I’m probably totally going to make), but not the long pepper (it’s described as a slightly spicier form of pepper when compared to black and white pepper and i’m unfortunately not into that kind of spice). consulting my dear friend professor google, i decided to approximate the long pepper with what i normally use, white pepper, plus some bonus spices.

overall I'm very glad I did this. it was tasty, and it was super satisfying to finally start this project. not sure i would necessarily make it again? but hey, if I'm ever stuck for a dessert and only have bread and spices, I guess I now have a useful trick up my sleeve.

G is for Gingerbread

Early in the pandemic, 2020 to be specific, my husband and I found ourselves watching a lot more television than we used to. Cheering ourselves up with Christmas programing in December, one night we stumbled on a documentary called Gingerbread Journeys (2015). I’m a foodie and he’s a history geek, so we decided to give it a try. It’s a super deep dive on the topic and we learned a lot. A whole lot.

Afterward, it occurred to me that I had at least one not-modern gingerbread recipe in my pile of cookbooks. I wondered if I had enough different recipes, specifically from different time periods, to make for an interesting baking project. It turned out the answer to that was a big ol’ “yes,” thanks both to The Joy of Cooking and a book I have with recipes based on 13th and 14th century sources.

So I thought I’d undertake The Gingerbread Project. And then, lo, many years passed. It’s a little hard to undertake a big project at Christmas, when so many other things are already going on. Also, my household is not a great match for large baking undertakings, as there are only two of us and one of us (hi) is diabetic.

But this year is kind of a “put languishing projects to rest” year for me. And it occurred to me that one gingerbread recipe per month is not a terribly intense undertaking. Plus, hey, regularly occurring obvious deadline, FTW. At least, I hope so. Stay tuned.