Grasmere, Cumbria, Lake District

Gingerbreads

In Belgium and the Netherlands, gingerbread is known as speculaas and speculoos, but also honingkoek and peperkoek. In Dinant in Belgian Wallonia, they have a rock-hard decorative version with beautiful imprinted rural scenes. Germany has its variants, for example lebkuchen, Switzerland has tirggel, among others, and the Scandinavian countries have their types of pepparkakor, brunekager and piparkakut. In Latvia it is called piparkukas, and piparkoogid in Estonia. You’ll find mézeskálacs in Hungary, pernicky in the Czech Republic and pierniczki in Poland. Russia has prianiki and France has its pain d’épice. If there’s one bake that connects us all in the world, it’s gingerbread.

We know that gingerbread was very popular in England because even Shakespeare mentioned it in one of his plays:

‘An I had but one penny in the world, thou shouldst have it to buy gingerbread …’

Act V, Scene I, Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, 1598

Gingerbread is, of course, not bread, but medieval recipes up to the early 18th century were certainly made with bread. Breadcrumbs were heated together with honey, spices and sometimes milk or alcohol and kneaded into a dough. Often the gingerbread was coloured with powdered sandalwood, which gave it a red colour. There was also white gingerbread, made from almonds instead of breadcrumbs, which looked a bit like a spiced baked marzipan. Both types of gingerbread and their many varieties with different spices were often made in wooden boards carved out in the shape of animals or human figures. The early gingerbreads weren’t baked in the oven, but rather dried out from the radiant heat of an open fire and then gilded with gold leaf. In the Middle Ages, gingerbread was eaten at the end of the meal to help digestion, but it soon became a festive treat that was baked and sold on various local and religious holidays.

From the second half of the 18th century we see treacle syrup – a by-product of the sugar refinery – appearing as a sweetener, and sugar is also added. Wheat flour is also used more frequently than breadcrumbs. Eliza Smith’s 18th-century book, The Compleat Housewife, contains six recipes for gingerbread, including one for Dutch gingerbread and one for white gingerbread. We often see the use of caraway seeds in the spice mix.

In the late 19th century we sometimes even find ten different types of gingerbread in one book, with different ingredients – sometimes black treacle, sometimes golden syrup and sugar. The term ‘gingerbread’ is therefore very broad. Gingerbread varied from region to region, sometimes with negligible differences and sometimes with a completely different result.

Grasmere gingerbread from Cumbria is the best known. It is a thin but chewy biscuit. In the same village of Grasmere, Rushbearers gingerbread was once available as a soft version that was rather more like a cake. The Yorkshire parkin from the north of England is also a gingerbread, made with oats. In the same region we find in the 19th century Whitley’s Original Wakefield gingerbread, which is a ginger cake with candied peel, and Sledmere gingerbread, both of which have disappeared today. Fortunately, Market Drayton gingerbread still exists in Shropshire – Billington’s has been baking it since 1817, but according to them the origins date back to 1793. For this gingerbread, the dough is piped into fingers.

Cornish fairings and Widecombe fair gingerbread are crisp biscuits made with a ball of dough that then forms cracks as it spreads out while baking. Sunderland gingerbread nuts – for which we find a recipe in the 19th-century cookbook of Mrs Beeton – look like the gingerbread nut we still know today. May Byron gives a recipe for the disappeared Hertford Hard gingerbread in 1914. Whitby gingerbread, also from Yorkshire, is a rectangular block of soft cake-like gingerbread and is still baked by Botham, a bakery started by Elizabeth Botham in 1865 and remains in the same family today. And then there are the numerous gingerbread recipes in the many cookbooks that are not linked to a region. The recipes in this chapter are but a small selection of Britain’s great gingerbread heritage.