The Staff Report this morning was actually pretty cool. Beyond knowing deep in my soul of souls that gingerbread is yummy, I hadn’t given it much thought.
Now I’m wondering where I could find recipes for the medieval gingerbread Dex talked about. Solid block of spiced honey indeed… drool them medieval folk knew how to make the decadent dishes!
LINK TO STAFF REPORT: What’s the origin of the gingerbread man? – CKDH
[Edited by C K Dexter Haven on 05-03-2001 at 03:42 AM]
[Old Man Billy Crystal] " Oh, nothing like a nice MLT. A mutton, lettuce and tomato. Where the mutton is just right and the tomatoes are nice and perky !!! " [/Old Man Billy Crystal].
I’ve got my volume here of " Living In The Middle Ages". Looks like they sure DID know how to bake, and cook. Kinda wonder about their wine though.
I haven’t seen the staff report you mention yet, but A Boke of Gode Cookery is a pretty good online collection of Medieval recipes. Specifically, they have a gingerbread recipe here. I hope this is what you’re looking for.
Here’s the link to the staff report, Origin of Gingerbread. Moving this to Staff Reports forum. - Jill
Thanks for the link to the report JillGat. The gingerbread recipe I linked to is exactly what the article described.
This isn’t exactly related to the medieval gingerbread recipe, but it is about that Staff Report, so I’ll post it here anyway.
Hey Dex, didn’t Rob ask about the origin of gingerbread men? The history of gingerbread itself was pretty cool, but how come the whole gingerbread phenomenon is pretty much reduced to man-shaped cookies these days? Maybe that’s the connection to Grantham?
Jet Jaguar, you rock. Even if you were spoofed in MST3K. That’s exactly the recipe I was looking for - most of the stuff is easily found, luckily enough! I’m off to the food store 
In the gingerbread report it says that the recipe changed from using treacle to molasses.
I’m just wondering what treacle was before molasses was invented? The dictionary says the name treacle was in use in ancient Greece. I don’t expect it was the sugarcane extract that treacle is today.
What was it ?
Jezza
Well, I saw (in Curiosities and Anamolies of Medicine) an interesting case of gingerbread women. Siamese twins were born in europe (not sure where) and the twinned women were much celebrated in the town in which they lived. One died before the other, who insisted they not be seperated but go to God together (at the time, of course, seperation probably had no chance of saving her life anyway). They were celebrated afterwards with gingerbread cookies in their likeness! The picture in the book looks like the dough was pressed in a shortbread-type mold, carved from wood.
Hey Dex, didn’t Rob ask about the origin of gingerbread men? The history of gingerbread itself was pretty cool, but how come the whole gingerbread phenomenon is pretty much reduced to man-shaped cookies these days? Maybe that’s the connection to Grantham? **
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I noticed that too. What’s up with that? Has Uncle Cecil gotten that bad about letting his hardworking Mailbag Staff take vacations, that they can’t grok the point of such a straighforward question, and go off on side tangents?
Yeah, yeah, Cece does that too, but he always wanders back to the main point and answers it.
<< Hey Dex, didn’t Rob ask about the origin of gingerbread men? The history of gingerbread itself was pretty cool, but how come the whole gingerbread phenomenon is pretty much reduced to man-shaped cookies these days? Maybe that’s the connection to Grantham? >>
I thought I said, very clearly, that:
(a) gingerbreak shaped like men, pigs, biblical scenes, portraits, etc. were popular way way back, origin unknown, but certainly well before 1740.
(b) I could find no reference to the origin of the stick-figure gingerbread person that is popular today.
When I wrote up the report, Ed also noted that I didn’t answer the question about the origin of stick-figure gingerbread men. I said that I wasn’t gonna get any closer unless the READER paid for me to go to England and do some detective work in Grantham, or perhaps in the British Museum. But I thought the stuff about gingerbread itself was (as you say) “pretty cool”, even if I couldn’t get to the specific question. Ed thought we might compromise by reporting the neat stuff about gingerbread and seeing if any of the Teeming M’s might have some ideas or sources or resources… or, perhaps, if one of our UK-based posters might want to go digging for us.
So, that’s why we wound up sort of avoiding the specific question. We found enough to debunk the idea that gingerbread men were invented in Grantham, UK, in 1740 (since we have much older references).
Thanks for the answer, Dex. Your report said that the pigs and biblical scenes and so forth were “designs impressed on the gingerbread by large wooden molds.” I read that as meaning the shapes were just small decorations on what must have been a pretty large cake. Did I just misread that, and the cakes themselves were shaped by the molds? A few sentences later, you said that shapes were elaborate, from castles to biblical scenes, but since you were still talking about gingerbreak “cakes” at that point, that still seemed a bit removed from the modern homo zingiberus.
I guess what this may boil down to is when did gingerbread make the transformation from large “cakes” to the small “cookies” of today? Once you’ve gone small, it wouldn’t have taken that much imagination to make the cookies human-shaped.
And hey, I wouldn’t be bothering you if the article hadn’t been so interesting!
DEX may have overlooked the fact that gingerbread pigs are sold by the thousands every day in the U.S. Not only do “The Scandinavians favor ginger pigs,” but so do Mexicans.
Check out the Mexican bakery nearest you and ask for “cochinitos”. The texture of a good cochinito is usually firm and somewhat chewey and closer to that of a hard roll than that of a cookie. If you like gingerbread you should try these. I don’t know about back East or up North, but in the Southwest, cochinitos can be found in almost every supermarket. And I know they can be found in Mexican neighborhoods like Pilsen in Chicago.
For those who have no experience with Spanish pronunciation, pronounce “cochinitos” like
co as in co-pilot,
chee as in cheap,
ni as in neat,
tos as in toss,
or think of it as rhyming with “go eat cheetos”
–Mr. Stefano
Well, my WAG as to when gingerbread changed from being big thick cakes to being small thin cookies (or shapes) would be when oven technology permitted it. If you’re baking something in a medieval built-into-the-wall bread oven, it’s difficult to bake something small like a gingerbread man without burning it, especially if you don’t have access to a minute timer (how do you know when to take it out? Cookies burn really fast, like within 1 minute).
So I suppose that when the (more or less) modern iron cook stove (range) came into use, where you have more control over the heat, that that would be when people started baking little gingerbread men instead of cakes.
mmmm, gingerbread - best gingerbread (of the cake variety) that I’ve ever had was in St. John’s, Newfoundland, and slathered with liquid custard - mmmm.
(The Beloved doesn’t like custard, but liked this combination because the waitress called it “gingerbread and cake sauce” - it slipped under the Beloved’s radar.)
I can’t believe I haven’t heard any mention of “stinking smut” in this thread. My professor of Fungi at the University of Guelph told us that gingerbread was created as a necessity, due to contamination of flour by the fungus commonly known as “Stinking Smut”. (It would disappoint him that I have completely forgotten the scientific name). The ginger masked the flavour, and the molasses masked the discoloration the fungus induced.
L
Re: medieval oven precision -
The medieval gingerbread I’ve made before (among others, the recipe in Pleyn Delit, the recipes in which I really reccomend, wasn’t cooked at all. I believe a few recipes were, but others weren’t - you combine stale bread crumbs with other things - honey, etc, and press it into the shape you want. A lot of them don’t even use ginger.