Gingerbread: A Treat for the Holidays

Are traditional cakes, cookies, and other baked goods part of your holiday meals, gift giving and celebrations? Some of these treats are purely seasonal. Others, like gingerbread, are eaten year-round but become especially popular between Thanksgiving and New Year. Gingerbread features in our family festivities for dessert (a delicious Christmas Eve gingerbread soufflé), as tree decorations, and in gingerbread house form, making me curious to find out more about this spicy treat. Luckily, Library of Congress resources hold the answer to just about any question! I headed off for some research in the Science and Business Reading Room, where much of the Library’s extensive cookbook collection is housed. Here’s a condensed version of the gingerbread history I gleaned from a pile of baking books (specific titles I consulted are listed at the end of the post).  

The ginger plant itself is native to Asia, and was valued by the Chinese, Arabs, Greeks, and Romans, largely for its medicinal properties. In the Middle Ages, a form of gingerbread reached Europe, where many honey-based regional variations developed, such as German lebkuchen and French pain d’épices.  The word itself derives from the old French “gingembrat” and initially had no connection to “bread” at all; it was the name given to the preserved gingerroot that first arrived in western Europe via modern-day Turkey. Over time, the increased availability of sugar made gingerbread cake and cookie confections more common. Queen Elizabeth I of England gave gingerbread figures and letters to favored dinner guests. Around the time of her reign (1558-1603), “gingerbread” came to mean a ginger-flavored cake made with molasses, which may explain why the word is applied to such a range of crisp and cakey baked goods from different eras and regions.

By the late 1600s, molasses-based gingerbread was well established, in both cookie and cake form. American colonists baked gingerbread using recipes that originated mostly in England and Germany. A softer version emerged when potash, a raising agent developed from wood ash, was added to the batter. One does wonder who first thought of doing this, and why, but a more cake-like gingerbread was the happy result. Spices and molasses helped to mask the taste of wood ash and other alkaline substances that pre-dated baking soda and powder.

Digitized resources detail a wide range of gingerbread traditions. The Library’s community cookbooks collection provides fascinating information about local history and customs in addition to American recipes. Written instructions range from easy to follow to  bewildering, but they are interesting if not always appetizing. Check out the following for a range of gingerbread entries:

• Woman’s Favorite Cook Book (1902) contains several recipes in the “cakes” section, (pages 247-8) and some cookie ones too (page 272).
• The Original Buckeye Cook Book and Practical Housekeeping, a community cookbook, (1905) has a whole chapter on gingerbread (pages 88-89), including instructions for fairy, white and sponge types.
• The Twentieth Century Club War Time Cook Book (1918) showed bakers how to be inventive when ingredients might be scarce. No Egg Molasses Ginger Bread is one of four recipes on page 89.
• A Daughters of the American Revolution Book of Recipes (1925) includes a recipe for Lafayette Ginger Bread (page 51), and describes how George Washington’s mother served it to the Marquis in 1784. Great Grandmother’s Gingerbread (page 207), basically lard, molasses and a bit of ground ginger, is both less historic and less appealing.

The Library’s digitized historic newspapers collection provide more information about international gingerbread traditions. German lebkuchen features prominently, in a 1929 flour advertisement, recommended in a 1936 column as an easy, last minute recipe, and in an article from 1941 as a good baking project for children. An Austrian variation is included in a 1960 feature about the Von Trapp family of The Sound of Music fame.

Gingerbread resources in the collections go beyond recipes. The traditional German Grimms’ Fairy Tales, their English translations and retellings, present the story of  “Hansel and Gretel”, two lost children who come across a wicked witch and her edible house in the woods. Described as made of cake, candy, and bread, this cottage is often credited with inspiring decorative gingerbread houses. “Peter and the Gingerbread Men” is the first tale in a 1935 book of stories about two children who live in Nuremberg, Germany, a city famous for its lebkuchen. “Snipp, Snapp, Snurr and The Gingerbread” (1936) is about three brothers and their adventures after they fall in a vat of gingerbread batter. I was thrilled to discover L. Frank Baum’s 1906 “John Dough and the Cherub”, in which an impeccably dressed gingerbread man escapes from a Paris bakery and embarks on a series of fantastical adventures. Newspapers serialized the book in twelve weekly installments that appeared on October 14, 21, 28, November 4, 11, 18, 25, December 2, 9, 16, 23 and 30.

Ideas for hosting a gingerbread party for kids start on page 215 of “The Children’s Book of Games and Parties” (Note that this 1913 book shows its age. The gingerbread party is appropriate from a modern point of view, but some of the other themes are not.) For an early “audiobook” experience, listen to the traditional story of the runaway Gingerbread Boy in a (rather scratchy) recording from 1912.

We hope these gingerbread nuggets have whetted your appetite for creating decorative houses, cookies, or cakes of your own this festive season. It’s certainly on my to-do list. Happy Holidays!

Many thanks to J.J. Harbster, Head of the Science Reference Section, fellow cookbook nerd and gingerbread fan. She generously shared her time, suggested digitized resources, and recommended the books below:

• American Cake, by Anne Byrn
• Making Gingerbread Houses, by Rhonda Massingham Hart
• Making and Baking Gingerbread Houses, by Lauren Jarrett and Nancy Nagle
• Gingerbread, by Jennifer Lindner McGlinn
• The White House in Gingerbread, by Roland Mesnier with Mark Ramsdell
• The Secret History of Christmas Baking, by Linda Raedisch
• The Gingerbread Book, by Steven Stellingwerff