Gingerbread is perhaps my favorite thing to eat during the holidays and so
running food history channel I decided to look into the history of gingerbread,
and what i found out shook me to my core... It got me all verklempt... I'm going to give you a topic:
Early gingerbread was neither ginger nor bread. Discuss!
Okay. I'm sorry about that.
Regardless of early gingerbread sometimes not being anything like what
we eat today, I decided, nevertheless, to make my own medieval gingerbread.
This time on Tasting History.
(Me during the holidays)
Now you might notice that today is not my usual posting day; usually it's on Tuesdays. But when the
channel 'How To Make Everything' reached out and let me know that they were making a mortar and pestle
from scratch in the way that it would have been done in ye olden days and wondered if I wanted
to use it in a recipe, I kind of had to jump at the chance. That's why I decided to go for gingerbread
which has a lot of spices to grind really take this puppy for a test drive.
So thank you so much to the team at 'How To Make Everything'
for sending me this wonderful mortar and pestle and make sure
to watch the video where they actually make it by hand at the link in the description.
So as I mentioned, I'm doing gingerbread but today's gingerbread ain't your mother's gingerbread.
Though, unlike some medieval recipes at least this one does contain ginger.
To Make Gingerbread - Take good honey and clarify it on the fire,
and take fair pandemayn or wastel bread and grate it,
and cast it into the boiling honey.
And stir it well together fast with the skylse that it burned not to the vessel.
And then take it down and put there in ginger, long pepper,
and saunders, and temper it up with thin hands. And then put them to a flat boyste and straw there on sugar
and pick therein cloves roundabout by the edge and in the mids if it please you etc.
So, I left that original spelling because 90% of those words I think that we can kind of figure out what they mean.
And any that weren't you know obvious I put in parentheses to to give you a bit of a guide.
Anyway this medieval gingerbread recipe from the 14th century sounds more like it's going to be
confectionary or almost candy-like than bread like. Quite a far cry from what we know is gingerbread today
especially that kind of soft, cakey gingerbread that I love so, so much.
Interesting thing about that gingerbread is that one of the very first recipes for that soft gingerbread
actually came from Amelia Simmons' 'American Cookery' from 1796. And you may remember that that is the
same book that has one of the first recipes for a custardy pumpkin pie like we know today.
So I guess we owe a lot to Miss Amelia Simmons for holiday baking.
But as for our medieval gingerbread what you'll need is:
1 cup or 330 grams of honey,
one half loaf or 250 grams of white bread.
A note about both of these ingredients; don't feel like you have to stick right to those exact amounts because it's
going to vary depending on what kind of bread you use and how dry it is. And it does need to be
really very dry because we're going to make bread crumbs out of it. If you don't want to
make bread crumbs then you can just buy bread crumbs and those will work as well.
1 tablespoon dried ginger,
3/4 teaspoon long pepper,
a half teaspoon sandalwood.
And a note on all three of those ingredients; those amounts again you can change up.
I really want a strong ginger flavor so I'm using quite a bit of ginger,
but if you want something a little bit more peppery then
you know, change those amounts. There is no rule the recipe is not specific so it's really up to you.
As for the saunders or sandalwood, it's hard to find, it doesn't really add much flavor, and
so if you want you can just add some red food coloring to kind of give it a red tint, but even
that you don't have to do. So you can feel free to leave it out. It's not going to make much of a
difference when it comes to taste.
A fourth cup or even less of sugar.
It's just enough to sprinkle on the top.
And several whole cloves for decoration.
You can also use some gold leaf for this recipe.
Again you don't have to; it's not mentioned in the recipe. But it is known that in medieval
times they often would bedight their gingerbread with gold leaf just to make it pretty. It actually
led to the English phrase "Take the gilt off the gingerbread."
So I'm going to be using just a little bit because I do think it's pretty.
So first things first, let's put our mortar and pestle to use.
So break up the bread with your hands into large bread crumbs and then using a mortar and pestle
grind them into fine bread crumbs.
Then grind your dried ginger
and your long pepper.
So the ginger actually ground up really easily; it took me like a minute or two which is pretty great.
The long pepper, less easy. Has less to do with the mortar and pestle I think in the fact that
pepper is just hard to grind and that's one reason why they have the pepper grinders at restaurants
rather than a mortar and pestle at the table.
Once everything is ground up, pour the honey into
a saucepan and set it over medium heat until it's boiling.
Now, you may recall, if you watched my video on mead,
there was a word in the recipe, "lengh", which I had trouble finding a definite definition.
And I actually had some wonderful linguists reach out to me with ideas of where it could have come from.
And all fascinating but nothing was definitive. Then I'm reading this recipe from about 200 years
later. Not even. 100 years later and the word 'boylenge' is spelled the same way, at least the
leng part. So I'm curious if leng ended up meaning boiling which... or was just a shortened version
which would have made sense in that original video. I think that is just... I think it's so
interesting etymologically which is probably why I don't get invited to a lot of dinner parties.
Now when it comes to the honey most honey that you're going to be buying is already clarified so
you're not going to have to skim anything off the top. If you are using un-clarified honey,.
then there might be some things at the top that you need to skim off so go ahead and skim those now.
Then once it's boiling, add in your bread crumbs until you get a nice homogeneous mixture.
So here's where you need to be a little bit flexible with the ingredients because the amount of breadcrumbs
that you're going to add can vary, so I would add just a bit at a time. I actually probably added
too many at once, but you can add just a bit at a time and you just want it to kind of
come away from the sides of the pot. That's the consistency you're looking for. You can always
add more you can also always add more honey even if it's not boiling it'll still it's fine because...
...it's fine.
Then turn off the heat and stir in your spices. Now it's going to be hot but
you can go ahead and taste a little bit at this time to see if you want to add some more spices.
Then take the mixture out of the pan and put it onto a sheet of parchment.
Then roll it out until it's nice and smooth.
At this point you want to let it firm up for a few hours or even
overnight which should give us plenty of time to see how this gingerbread
became this gingerbread.
"They brought him first the sweet wine and mead also in a maslin, and royal spicery of gingerbread
that was full fine, and licorice, and also cumin, with sugar that is so nice."
Now that was from Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales written around the same time as our recipe and it lets us
see that this was not a treat for the masses, but rather an opulent item worthy of the royal spicery.
And while not always necessarily royal, gingerbread and other spiced breads had definitely been a
luxury item since their introduction to Europe.
According to legend, in 992 the Armenian monk,
Gregory of Nicopolis, brought a honey and spice treat, possibly similar to those that had been
eaten in ancient Rome and even ancient Greece, to Bondroy, France where,
"...his guests, on tasting he cake believed they were experiencing all the delights of Heaven."
But what Gregory brought probably didn't actually have any ginger in it,
but was what the French would later call pain d'éspices or spice bread.
But ginger or no, spiced cakes began cropping up all over northern Europe.
Pfefferkucken or pepper cake in Germany, which oddly enough didn't have any pepper in it,
or Piernik Toruńskie or Toruń gingerbread from Poland which did contain ginger and is first mentioned as
being baked in 1380 around the same time as our recipe from England. Now before that in the 13th
century, the monks of Nuremberg began creating a baked good called lebkuchen. And they took this
cake so seriously that in the 15th century, they established a guild to regulate its production.
Essentially other than Christmas and Easter nobody was allowed to make this cake
except for the bakers in the guild. And according to legend
the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III, in an effort to bolster his popularity,
had four thousand lebkuchen molded in his likeness for the children of the city.
Following Frederick's foray into propagandistic baked goods,
Queen Elizabeth I herself, decided to dabble in the power of the gingerbread man.
Supposedly, at one of these grand feasts that the Virgin Queen held, she had baked a collection
of gingerbread men, and perhaps gingerbread women, all in the likeness of her courtiers and visiting dignitaries.
Now we don't know a lot about why exactly she did this or how well it was received,
but I like to imagine that it was Elizabeth's way of
telling people what she thought of them at any given time.
"Here is your gingerbread likeness Lady Knolles. It really catches your beauty.
And Sir Walter Raleigh... the resemblance is uncanny."
Queen Elizabeth was not the only Elizabethan
enamored with gingerbread for at the same time William Shakespeare wrote
"An had I but one penny in the world, thou shouldst have it to buy gingerbread."
So by now you could buy gingerbread for just a penny
which actually, while still rather expensive for what it is, is in the reach of much
more of the population. So it's no wonder that around this time we start seeing gingerbread
cropping up in a lot of the recipe books for the average wealthy household.
And small versions that were kind of like modern ginger biscuits
were actually being sold at fairs all around Britain.
And still to this day in Cornwall something called a fairing is basically a little ginger biscuit.
But to see gingerbread really come into its artistic own we have to go back over to the continent
for gingerbread and springerle molds.
Now used on all sorts of spiced breads the origin of these
intricately carved wooden molds is up for some debate.
Some say Torun, Poland. Some say Schwabia, Germany.
But regardless of where they came from they are absolutely beautiful works of art and can
often be as large as three feet tall.
I have always wanted one of these antique molds that you can get
so maybe by next Christmas I'll have one and I'll use it in a video. That's my 2021 goal.
Now there is a 12th century french poem that translates to The Land of Cockaigne; nothing to do
with its unfortunate modern homonym. Instead it was this kind of mythical, medieval land of
plenty and opulent foods that crops up all through art and literature through the Middle ages.
And in this poem a peasant is dreaming of a land where "The houses were made of barley sugar and cakes
the streets were paved with pastry."
Sounds just delightful. So seven hundred years after this poem,
two brothers decided to retell the story in a sort of fairy tale called
"Das Märchen vom Schlaraffenland."
And perhaps it was one of these houses made of cake that inspired another
fairy tale that these two wrote about a non-child friendly, cannibalistic witch;
not very Christmassy you say. But the Grimm brothers fairy tale "Hansel und Gretel" started a
tradition of decorating gingerbread houses around Christmas time that flourished throughout Germany,
Europe, and even in the Americas all through the 19th century.
Now I can tell you that our Medieval gingerbread's consistency
is not going to make for a very good gingerbread house, but as
Paul Hollywood always says on the Great British Bake Off whenever they're making gingerbread houses,
"It all comes down to taste."
So once your gingerbread is cooled and firmed up a bit
go ahead and straw or scatter a bit of sugar over the top. The amount is really up to you.
Now at this point you can cut it up however you want. I ended up just doing little squares but you could use
cookie cutters or even have some sort of stamp and imprint something on it; it should be soft enough to do so.
Then you can go ahead and decorate it with the cloves and/or the gold leaf if you want.
So here we are: Medieval Gingerbread.
Now the interesting thing with the clove is I'm guessing
people weren't eating full cloves, because that's odd, but just putting the clove in there for a few
minutes, I'm thinking it's going to give it quite a bit of flavor because I can smell it really coming
through it doesn't take much clove is really really strong.
So let's give this a try.
The nice thing is if there's any gold on it you can actually eat that um... It is edible.
Let's have a go.
Hmm.
Very candy-like.
It's a little grittier than I might like.
Lots of ginger which is what I want.
Really nice... really comes through there's a little burn there at the end because I use that
that dried ginger that I ground up. If you like ginger, these are a wonderful little...
little candy, because that's what they are. They're really more like a... almost like a gummy candy.
But they're really nice. I wouldn't equate it with gingerbread though.
So one thing I wanted to mention is that Tasting History now has a Discord, so I'm putting a link in the description.
If you're on Discord and want to talk more about food and history or other things like cats and Pokemon
go ahead and join our Tasting History Discord.
So thank you again to the team over at How To Make Everything
for sending me the wonderful mortar and pestle which gave me the impetus to do this
additional video this Christmas season and
I will see you next time on Tasting History.