[Sca-cooks] Gingerbread was Food for a Demo

[Johnna Holloway]

I suspect that it was a way to make a sweet confection out of
foods that might be at hand. Grated bread and spices combined with honey.
Plat in *Delights for Ladies *indicates that it's for "festival times."

22 - To make Ginger-bread. Take three stale Manchets, and grate them: 
dry them, and sift them thorow a fine sieve: then adde unto them one 
ounce of Ginger being beaten, and as much Cinamon, one ounce of 
Liquorice and Anniseeds beeing beaten together, and searced, halfe a 
pound of sugar; then boil all these together in a posnet, with a quart 
of claret wine, till they come to a stiff paste with often stirring of 
it; and when it is stiffe, mould it on a table, and so drive it thin, 
and put it in your moulds: dust your moulds with Cinamon, Ginger, and 
Liquorice, being mixed together in fine powder. This is your 
Ginger-bread used at the Court, and in all Gentlemens houses at festival 
times. It is otherwise called dry Leach.

Plat's dry gingerbread on the other hand contains almonds.
23 - To make dry Ginger-bread. Take half a pound of Almonds, and as much 
grated cake, and a pound of fine sugar, and the yolks of two new laid 
egges, the juice of a lemmon, and two grains of musk: beat all these 
together til they come to a paste: then print it with your moulds: and 
so dry it upon papers in an oven, after your bread is drawn.

Johnnae


Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius wrote: I thought it might either be a 
joke, or perhaps in keeping with the
> idea (rightly or wrongly) that gingerbread in this form is one of  
> those "lost bread" dishes that could be argued (not necessarily  
> successfully) to be a use of expensive spices to make unpalatable  
> bread palatable. In other words, a use of spices constituting a frugal  
> expedient, as has been posited in the rotten-meat-and-spices scenario.
>
> Of course, most or all of the arguments against the rotten meat thing  
> would also apply here.
>
> Or maybe I just didn't get the point...
>
> Adamantius
>
>   
>