[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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