This 150 year old cookbook has a beautiful illustration of a gingerbread house ... or so
I thought. But the book says it's made of gum paste which is like fondant that sits really
hard it's not nice to eat. I'm going to try and make this design out of gingerbread and figure
out when gingerbread houses were invented and why we make them at Christmas I like
my gingerbread dough with lots of spices so if you want my recipe I'll put all the details of
that on the HowToCookThat.com website there's a link in the description I can't find any
mention of Ginger or gingerbread houses in the Bible so this tradition has nothing to do with
baby Jesus or the real meaning of Christmas. The earliest recipe for gingerbread that I could find
was from 1450 but it's made from honey grated bread saffron pepper cloves and Sandalwood,
nothing like what I'm making. Lots of old cookbooks do have gingerbread recipes in them
like this one that says pour the mixture into a greased tin and bake. It's a cake recipe it's not
a stiff dough that can be rolled out like the one that we're doing here. Nuremburg in Germany is the
self-proclaimed capital of gingerbread in the 15th century the monks there even established a guild
to regulate gingerbread production and if you weren't part of the guild well you weren't allowed
to make gingerbread except at Christmas and Easter which makes me wonder if that's why it's eaten at
Christmas. But the monks' original recipe there was a mixture of honey ground nuts citrus peels
spices and it had little or no flour at all so the batter was so sticky that it had to be baked
on rice paper wafers and there's no mention of gingerbread houses historically there either.
The house that I'm attempting to make today did not have a template, the book just said before
constructing it each part should be planned out in cardboard and the paste afterwards cut
out from these cardboard patterns. So thanks a lot that's not much help there so I've taken the time
to design the template for you and put that on my website. Now we just need to cut out all of these
pieces from gingerbread. If you do need a straight edge on a piece leave a border of gingerbread
in place while it bakes but if not if you want rounded edges remove the border straight away.
Apparently in the 16th century Queen Elizabeth the first had gingerbread men baked in the likeness of
her guests as gifts and at around the same time Shakespeare wrote a comedy that was performed
for the Queen in which one of the characters said: "if I had but one penny in the world
thou shouldst have it to buy gingerbread". So the Queen obviously liked gingerbread but in my quest
to find the first mention of a gingerbread house I started looking through gingerbread recipes in
old cookbooks to find one that would be suitable. The earliest written recipe that I could find in
English for this style of gingerbread was from 1780 ... it has treacle eggs brown sugar ginger
lots of other spices butter and as much flour as we knead into a very stiff paste and it says to
roll it out and cut it into what form you please. But again there's no mention of using this to
make a gingerbread house. If you search online for the history of gingerbread houses everyone
just seems to have the same story which tends to mean they're all copying one source and all that
does is talk about the history of ginger and then skips forward in time and says gingerbread houses
were popularized by the publication of the story of Hansel and Gretel. So I went back and read the
original 1812 story in Grim's fairy tales. Now their book also has lots of other fairy tales in
it like Rapunzel and they didn't make up all of these, the story of Hansel and Gretel apparently
originated back in 1315 where bad weather in Europe caused crop failures and a long devastating
famine. The price of wheat tripled making bread which was the staple food unaffordable for a
lot of people and so people had nothing to eat. In one recorded incident even the king found it
difficult to get bread to feed himself and his entourage so if the King is finding it hard to
get food you can imagine how the poor people are finding it. It's estimated that between
10 and 15% of the population died. Now given that context let's read a section of the story
where the starving children Hansel and Gretel are abandoned and wandering lost in the woods:
On the third day they went again until midday and that's when they saw a little house. It was built
entirely of bread and was covered with cakes (or the side note there says pancakes) and the windows
were of light sugar. So unlike the modern movie adaptations that show a house made of gingerbread
and covered in chocolate and candy this house was made of bread. The thing that people who were
starving were longing for so that they wouldn't die. So it's a bit unclear how that popularized
gingerbread houses at the time and even if it did popularize gingerbread houses that would mean they
were being made prior to that so we still don't know who started this whole thing. So next I
started searching other old documents for anything that had the words gingerbread and house in the
same document and I found some interesting things like a court case where a squib or a firework was
thrown on Fair Day and landed on a gingerbread stall and the owner of the stall to save his wares
threw it across the market house onto another gingerbread stall the owner of which with the
like objective threw it again and it struck the plaintiff in the head. That sounds like a crazy
scene from a cartoon not real life but it actually happened. There were also a few other documents
that talked about gingerbread houses as a style of architecture but the oldest document I could
find with reference to an edible gingerbread house was a story in a magazine from 1896 that
was written by Sarah Ornduet and it says: On the table was a model of the old Bowden house made of
a durable gingerbread with all the windows and doors in the right places and sprigs of genuine
lilac set at the front it must have been baked in sections in one of the last great brick ovens and
fastened together on the morning of the day. There was a general sigh when this fell into ruin at the
feast's end and it was shared by a great part of the assembly, not without seriousness and as if it
were a pledge and a token of loyalty. I met the maker of the gingerbread house which had called
up lively remembrances of a childhood story. She had the gleaming eye of an enthusiast and a look
of high ideals. I could just as well have made it all a frosted cake she said but it wouldn't
have been the right shade. The old house as you observe was never painted and I concluded that
plain gingerbread would represent it at best. It wasn't all that I expected it would be she said
sadly as many an artist had said before of his work. I also have a problem with my gingerbread
house ... remember how I made this base hollow? Well it's not strong enough to hold the weight
of this massive house. So now you can see the outer archways are buckling as the centre has
dropped down. I ended up lifting the whole thing off and adding a jar into the centre
right down on the baseboard for support and then putting it all back on again so that it didn't
fall over. I just had to cover up the cracks on the archways with more leaves and now I'm
going to hand the gingerbread house search over to you guys, particularly anyone who's watching
in Germany because if gingerbread houses did start in Germany it would make sense that the historical
documents relating to them would be written in German. And if you do manage to find any documents
about about gingerbread houses that were published prior to 1896 let us know all the details in the
comments in English preferably. With thanks to my patrons for your support of this channel over this
year I hope you all have an amazing Christmas God bless and I'll see you in the new year ❤️