It’s December, it’s holidays, holidays mean gingerbread, and here at the Pink Palace of Bitchery And Also Food (we really like food), that means that we crack a book and pull out a recipe for gingerbread from the 14th Century.
Going back that far means we have something very different than the cake or cookies that we think of now. The 14th century version is bread crumbs flavored with ginger and other spices and cooked with honey. You can make shapes with it, and color it, and it’s a lot of fun. It’s also a great beginner recipe for playing around, so a lot of people have worked with it.
The recipe I’m using is:
Gingerbrede
Take goode honye & clarefie it on þe fere, & take fayre paynemayn or wastel brede & grate it, & caste it into þe boylenge hony, & stere it well togyder faste with a sklyse þat it bren not to þe vessell. & þanne take it doun and put þerin ginger, long pepere & saundres, & tempere it up with þin handes & than put hem to a flatt boyste & straw þeron sugar & pick þerin clowes rounde aboute by þe egge and in þe mydes, if it plece you.
Roughly translated, that is:
Take good honey and clarify it (less important when one isn’t using honey straight from the hive), and take good bread or waste bread and grate it, and put it into the boiling honey, and stir it well together with a wooden stick that it doesn’t burn to the pot. Then take it out and put in ginger, long pepper, and saunders and mix it up with your hands, put it into a flat box and strew on sugar and put on cloves around the edge and the middle, if it please you.
Simple.
So for the first round (I’m going to toss in a spoiler and say that the first try I did I got the ratio of honey to breadcrumbs wrong), I got brioche rolls and skinned them and dried them to make the crumbs. Yes, I could have used a container of breadcrumbs (and did for round two) but making my breadcrumbs was what I had the time and energy for.
The thing with historical cooking is this: there are always substitutions. Yes, I could have made bread based on a medieval recipe, but it still wouldn’t taste the same because the wheat is different, the yeast is different, the water, the milk, the eggs- they’ve all changed in the intervening centuries, and a modern oven isn’t going to be the same as cooking in a medieval one, so it’s still not going to be 100% authentic and accurate. You are always making choices about how far down the rabbit hole you want to go, and I assure you all that the choices I make are based on how much time, money, and energy I am able to invest at a given time. So I bought bread and dried it out and grated it to make breadcrumbs, and I made sure the honey I bought was labeled as 100% honey and didn’t involve corn syrup (It happens) but I didn’t have time to acquire long pepper.
There’s another recipe from the same time period that’s almost identical, but it doesn’t include ginger. A lot of people assume that’s just a 500 year old typo. I wanted to make sure I used one that specified the use of ginger. The other thing this other recipe clarifies is that the saunders is used to make the dish red, which is why I didn’t worry about it for these purposes.
So I dried out the bread and grated it and boiled up the honey, and my ratios were way off- it was too runny and I didn’t let the honey cook long enough to candify at all, so it was a sticky mess with no holding power. I had way too much honey and not enough breadcrumbs.
After hoping that letting it sit would help it set (it did not) I went “fuck it” and got a container of breadcrumbs (making certain that they were plain and not “Italian” or “Seasoned” which would have been very sad), and tried again.
This time I used a half cup of honey to about 3/4 breadcrumbs. I ground the crumbs down a bit to make them a bit more even. I let the honey boil for about 45 seconds before I poured in the breadcrumbs and stirred it, letting it continue to cook (while I took a picture) and added the ginger (some and then a bit more) and pepper (enough) (about a dash).
Then I threw the gunk on a parchment paper, folded the paper over the gunk (dough, I guess?) and used a rolling pin to flatten it out.
Once it was to a thickness I liked, I sprinkled sugar and ground cloves over the top, let it cool, cut into small pieces, and brought it to the Boston Bitchery Meetup to inflict it on the unsuspecting.
The general consensus was “Well, I prefer the cookie- or cake-like gingerbread” (which is fair) and that’s it’s not really a cookie (which it’s not) and that it’s more like a toffee. Yeah, that’s true; it’s a candy.
If you want to try a fairly easy, low-stakes medieval recipe for a holiday party, then this is it! This recipe has already been to one and there’s enough left over that it’ll be brought to another. It’s simple, it doesn’t require any off the wall ingredients, and you don’t need to make much because it’s REALLY sweet and most people just want a little.
And if you want a recommendation for a historical cake type gingerbread, may I suggest Mount Vernon’s Lafayette Gingerbread? George Washington’s mother, Mary Ball Washington, made it for the Marquis de Lafayette one time, and it’s really good. I made it for dessert for Thanksgiving, and was SO happy with it.
I love historical kitchen. My other half has been making some epic gingerbread (the biscuit kind) sculptures for Christmas, but we’ve made this kind before. When you think Hansel and Gretel, this is the sort the bricks of the witches house were made out of.
Quick breadcrumbs tip: if you can’t be arsed to grate it, just bung it in a food processor and blitz it. The stale ends of a sliced loaf make especially good crumbs this way.
I give up. What’s saunders?
And what is long pepper?
This gingerbread really is delicious, although the texture is unexpected.
Saunders is sandalwood, I gather (who knew it was edible? Now dying to gnaw on some), and long pepper is apparently regular pepper (idk why, it does grow in a long trailing spike?) but I am currently obsessed with sklyse: a kind of spoon or spatula or paddle. Well, which?! Google image search has failed me.
I have a deep and abiding love for obscure kitchen implements with a highly specific purpose that would come in handy maybe once a year, bonus if they are expensive and don’t fit in my kitchen (nothing does). I have been craving a spurtle (mostly it’s fun to tell my brother to go bodger a spurtle) and now I suspect I need a skylse. Oooh, maybe of sandalwood.
Long pepper means peppercorns still in the pod. The cook would have to suse a knife to cut it open. If you have ever scraped vanilla beans out of the pod, it’s the same thing.
My French is not very good, only what I’ve gleaned from reading cookbooks so I wonder if “paynemayn ” might mean “stale bread” because I vaguely remember a french cooking term that had “pain” in it and it meant state bread. Which would absorb honey differently than crumbs made from any fresh bread.
Also If I were to make this and if I’d want to be as authentic as possible yet did not want to make my own crumbs, I think I would choose panko, rather than other commercially available breadcrumbs because those have all sorts of other things in them whereas panko is more pure.
How did you decide that “saundres”means sandalwood? I looked at it and I thought it might mean “sundries” as in sundry other things one might add such as salt, cinnamon, ground cloves.
I also googled Colonial cooking terms and neither saundres or skylse. What is a spurtle, please?
I also googled eigtheenth century baking terms and for both searches had the same result: http://recipes.history.org/glossary/
I checked out that recipe for Lafayette Gingerbread. Sounds wonderful. There are also moreauthentic Colonial recipes on that site. http://www.mountvernon.org/recipes
A spurtle is a wooden stirring stick, many recies for authentic Scots porridge insist it must be stirred with a spurtle. It’s always seemed to me to be a guaratee of burnt bits on the bottom of the pan.
Here’s another historic gingerbread recipe, this one is gingerbread cookies from the Raleigh Tavern in Colonial Williamsburg. http://makinghistorynow.com/2014/10/gingerbread-cookies-raleigh-tavern-recipe/
I went to the Boston meet-up partly (mainly) for the good. This was pretty good but not nearly as good as the macaroons. It’s the consistency of jelly candy, tastes strongly of honey and a little bit of peppery ginger.
But I would totally put the dried sliced bread in the food processor instead of grating it. That is above and beyond, RHG.
Hi Redheaded Bitch, I have a new (ish) blog that is a free online serial romance novel in a food blog. I have no idea how to get the word out but since I saw you did a recipe (I love gingerbread and so will have to give this recipe a try!) and know you like romance I thought you might be interested in visiting my little blog. Hope so. Just found yours and subscribed to your site. So far I love it!
If I’ve broken some kind of rule putting this comment here, I guess just call me a bitch and delete it.
Thanks!
http://www.romancewithrecipes.com
About grating bread. I have to second the food processor recommendation. Back in the day before food processors were invented, I made Grape Nuts cereal from the recipe in More with Less cookbook. The stuff was baked all spread out in a jelly roll pan and after it cooled, it had to be grated. All I had was a hand grater and what a mess. The cereal was delicious but I never made it again until I had a food processor in my kitchen, several years later.
Spurtles are awesome or at least mine is. I especially use it when I dont want gunk on the bottom! (hugs spurtle)
Giddypony how is your spurtle better than a standard wooden spoon? I am honestly curious no being snarky.
@giddypony, what does your spurtle look like? I googled and nothing.
I have both long pepper and saunders. Next time you need weird spices, just ask; there’s a good chance I have what you need.
@Morwenna, where did you obtain saunders and what is it? I just searched Penzeys website and there was no match.
I used a recipe almost the same as to the Raleigh Tavern gingerbread to make cookies for a Victorian Christmas party yesterday. I think the kids would have run away screaming from gingerbread made with real bread!
Just saw this recipe:
http://outlanderkitchen.com/2015/12/07/claires-chewy-molasses-cookies/
@GloriaMarie I’m not sure where you’re getting your information, but long pepper (piper longum) and the black pepper used in most modern homes (piper nigrum) are two different plants, not just different preparations of the same plant.
There are a bunch of on-line vendors who sell spices and herbs that have fallen out of fashion (Saunders, Grains of Paradise, Long Pepper, etc.). The Spice House (thespicehouse.com) is one.
[…] Medieval gingerbread. […]