[Sca-cooks] gyngerbrede

Johnna Holloway johnnae at mac.com
Thu Sep 10 06:08:39 PDT 2009


But in checking various reference sources this am, it appears
that my saying previously "
>>> There are breads and cakes that contain ginger from all over Europe.
>>> What defines a gingerbread after all? A cake or bread with ginger,  
>>> right?"

is in line with such sources as follows:
> gingerbread
>
> → noun  [mass noun]
> 1. cake made with treacle or syrup and flavoured with ginger.
> 2. [often as modifier] elaborate or ornate decoration, especially on  
> the eaves or porch of a building.
>
> take the gilt off the gingerbread   (Brit.) make something no longer  
> attractive or desirable.
>
> - ORIGIN Middle English (originally denoting preserved ginger), from  
> Old French gingembrat, from medieval Latin gingibratum, from  
> gingiber (see ginger). The change in the ending in the 15th cent.  
> was due to association with bread.
>
> How to cite this entry: "gingerbread noun"  The Oxford Dictionary of  
> English (revised edition).
>
> gingerbread   Cake or biscuits flavoured with ginger and treacle,  
> often baked in the shape of an animal or person, and glazed.
>
>  How to cite this entry: "gingerbread"  A Dictionary of Food and  
> Nutrition.
>
> gingerbread   The cakelike consistency of gingerbread bears little  
> resemblance to bread, so it comes as no surpirise that gingerbread  
> has no etymological connection with bread. It was originally, in the  
> thirteenth century, gingebras, a word borrowed from Old French which  
> meant ‘preserved ginger’. But by the mid-fourteenth century,  
> through the process known as folk etymology (the substitution of a  
> more familiar for a less familiar form), -bread had begun to replace  
> -bras, and it was only a matter of time before sense followed form.  
> One of the earliest known recipes for it, in the early fifteenth- 
> century cookery book Good Cookery, directs that it be made with  
> breadcrumbs boiled in honey with ginger and other spices. This is  
> the lineal ancestor of the modern soft cakelike gingerbread in which  
> treacle has replaced honey. It is made either in a raised cake shape  
> or in flat biscuits, which are commonly baked in fanciful shapes,  
> such as people (gingerbread men) or animals. In former times these  
> would be decorated with gold leaf—whence the expression ‘take the  
> gilt off the gingerbread’ (not recorded before the late nineteenth  
> century).
>
>  How to cite this entry: "gingerbread"  An A-Z of Food and Drink.  
> Ed. John Ayto. Oxford university Press, 2002.
>
In other languages it's translated by Oxford Reference Online as:
>  gingerbread n   panpepato;  11. gingerbread    pan m de jengibre;  
> 12. gingerbread  noun Pfefferkuchen, der
>
>  From OED
>
> a. In early examples app.: Preserved ginger.
>
> b. From the 15th c. onwards: A kind of plain cake, compounded with  
> treacle, and highly flavoured with ginger. Formerly made into shapes  
> of men, animals, letters of the alphabet, etc., which were often  
> gilded.
> 1299 Durham MS. Burs. Roll, In ij Gurdis de Gingebrar, xxvjs. viijd.
> 1302-3 Durham MS. Burs. Roll, In vij pixidibus de Gingebras.
> 1352-3 Durham MS. Burs. Roll, Et in duabus copulis de Pynyonade et  
> de Gyngebrede.
> C. 1386 Chaucer Sir Thopas 142 They sette hym Roial spicerye And  
> Gyngebreed.
> C. 1430 Two Cookery-bks. i. 35 Gyngerbrede. Take a quart of  
> hony..Safroun, pouder Pepir..gratyd Brede [etc.; ginger is not  
> mentioned].
> 1555 Machyn Diary 99 Dyssys of spyssys and frut, as marmelad, gynbred.
> 1573-80 Baret Alv. C. 10 A kinde of cake or paste made to comfort  
> the stomacke: ginger bread, mustaceum.
> 1613 Beaum. & Fl; Coxcomb iv. vii, Fetch two or three grating loaves  
> out of the kitching, to make gingerbread of.
>
>
Johnnae


>
>
> On Sep 10, 2009, at 1:58 AM, David Friedman wrote:
>
>>> There are breads and cakes that contain ginger from all over Europe.
>>> What defines a gingerbread after all? A cake or bread with ginger,  
>>> right?
>>> And again using medievalcookery.com, here's a few examples:
>>
>>
>> None of those is gyngerbrede, in the sense of something similar to  
>> the gyngerbrede in _Curye on Englysche_ (the honey and breadcrumbs  
>> one--there's a different one as well). For one thing, it isn't a  
>> cake or bread--it has about the texture of fudge.
>>
>> I presume the question was whether something similar is made  
>> elsewhere in Europe. I don't know the answer.
>>
>> [examples of unrelated things that could also be called  
>> "gingerbread" snipped.]
>> -- 
>> David/Cariadoc
>> www.daviddfriedman.com
>




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