Today we’re making a wonderful honey cake. Thanks for joining us today on 18th Century
cooking with James Townsend and Son.
This honey cake recipe is from Amelia Simmons’ 1796 cookbook, American Cookery. It is probably
what we would think of as gingerbread today. It is sweetened with honey like many of the
early gingerbread recipes were, but this one is leavened. It’s leavened with pearl ash,
which is not typical of early gingerbread recipes. Because this is leavened I got a
nice and fluffy texture, unlike most of those early gingerbreads that were a very hard cake.
Like our last recipe, this one’s very simple. We’re going to start off with 3 ½ cups
of flour. To our flour, I’ll add 1 tablespoon of ginger, 1 tablespoon of cinnamon and 3
tablespoons of diced candied orange peel. Let’s also add 1/3 of a cup of white sugar.
Now let’s focus on our wet ingredients. I have 1 egg well beaten and to this I’ll
add 2/3 of a cup of honey.
I have 1 ¼ cups of milk. Now this works best if you have a sour milk. If you don’t have
sour milk, you can add, say, a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar to this, and to
this milk, I will add a ½ a teaspoon of our pearl ash. It needs to completely dissolve
before we add it into our dry ingredients.
Finally, we’ll add our milk and pearl ash mixture to the honey and egg.
After kneading, let’s roll these out to ½ inch or ¾ inch thick.
Again, you can cut these in any shape you like. We’re going to cut them in a simple
rectangle.
For baking these, I’m going to use the tin kitchen that’s in our catalog. If you’re
going to bake them at home, I would suggest 325 at approximately 25 minutes.
These look great. Let’s see how they taste. So they’re very nice. Have a wonderful spicy
sweet flavor with the honey. They’re a little chewy, but light and fluffy. They’re certainly
not hard at all. You can see the wonderful crumb on these. They’re nice and light and
fluffy. This pearl ash is doing a great job of leavening these. They were probably extremely
popular in their day. These are really, really wonderful. These would make a great holiday
treat.
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us today as we savor the flavors and the aromas of the 18th century.