The History of
Gingerbread

It has been baked in Europe for centuries. In some places, it was a soft cake, in others, a brittle cookie. It was sometimes light, sometimes dark, sometimes sweet, sometimes spicy, but almost always it was cut into shapes and colorfully decorated, or stamped with a mold and dusted with white sugar to make the impression visible. We have inherited gingerbread from many old times and many old places and its history is filled with traditions we have made our own.

TAKE ME TO THE FAIR

If you lived in London in 1614, your family would have gone to the Bartholomew Fair on August 24th. You might have gone there to buy a winter’s worth of cloth, but the children would have tugged you to the puppet show, begged you to let them see Lantern Leatherhead’s hobbyhorses and toys, and scampered among the carts and trays of the noisy, wandering costermongers looking for one special peddler. Then they would hear her cry:

Buy any gingerbread!

Gilt Gingerbread!

There she was, Joan Trash, the gingerbread woman! The children would run up to her, peek over the rim of her basket, and their eyes would widen at what they saw: little gilded figures of men, women, animals, saints—especially many of St. Bartholomew, whose feast day the fair celebrated—all in gingerbread! You surely would have bought some of the gingerbread woman’s wares. But if you had been nearby a few moments earlier you would have heard the hobbyhorse seller muttering to anyone within earshot that Joan Trash’s gingerbread was made with “stale bread, rotten eggs, musty ginger, and dead honey.” If you lived in 1614, you would have known the recipe to be accurate but would have shrugged off the insult.

Country fairs in England were rowdy places where whole towns traded, played, ate, danced, drank, and sang. Roguish merchants made a high art out of shouting colorful insults about each other’s wares, trying to call attention to their own. Frequently they ended up in the special pie-powders court—(court of dusty feet—where petty grievances were settled). The shouting matches among the merchants were just a colorful show, certainly nothing that would keep anyone away from the gingerbread basket.

But what about the strange ingredients Lantern Leatherhead described? In reality, he and Joan Trash are just characters in Ben Jonson’s playBartholomew Fair, but there is nothing imaginary about the fair or about that recipe.

Of the special cakes prepared for holidays and feasts in England, many were gingerbread. If a fair honored a town’s patron saint, that saint’s image might have been stamped into the gingerbread you would buy. If the fair was a special market day, the cakes would probably be decorated with an edible icing to look like men, animals, valentine hearts, or flowers. Sometimes the dough was simply cut into round “snaps.”

Brown, gingery “fair buttons,” for example, were baked for the Easter Pleasure Fair in Norwich and the Easter and pre-Lenten fair in nearby Great Yarmouth. A kind of gingerbread stick that was a little like shortbread was traditional at the Ashbourne Fair in Derbyshire on the first Sunday after August 16th. Gingerbread wafers were eaten with cheese, sweets, and spiced ale at the mid-September Barnstable Fair in Devonshire. Little cones and tubes made out of gingerbread were hawked in the streets of Nottingham during the great “goose fair,” when thousands of geese were driven into the town and people came from all over to choose a Christmas goose. And in Yorkshire on Christmas eve, the festive atmosphere in homes spilled out into the streets, and children went from house to house visiting, singing, and begging for pennies and bits of Yule cake, spice cake, or pepper cake.

A PENNYWORTH OF GINGER

Gingerbread in the England of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson was made out of breadcrumbs, honey, and spices. Red and white wine, ale, and brandy were also commonly called for in recipes. A cookbook published in 1615 gives the full details of how “a course Gingerbread” was made in those days:

Take a quart of honie and set it on the coales and refine it: then take a pennyworth of ginger, as much peper, as much Licoras, and a quarter of a pound of Aniseedes, and a penny worth of Saunders [red sandalwood]: All these must be heaten and seared, and so put up the hony: then put in a quarter of a pint of claret wine or old Ale: then take three penny Manchets [the best kind of white bread] finely grated and strow it amongst the rest; and stirre it till it come to a stiffe Past, and then make it into Cakes and drie them gently. (Gervase Markham, The English Hus-wife.)

Gradually, molasses and flour replaced the honey and breadcrumbs, making a dark, rich gingerbread that became part of the lively street life in English cities. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the wandering gingerbread vendors called:

Hot spice-gingerbiead, hot!

hot! all hot!

Come, buy my spice-

gingerbread, smoking hot!

or

Hot spiced gingerbread nuts,

nuts, nuts!

If one’ll warm you,

wha-a-a-t’ll a pound dot?

At the weekday markets, where working people bought their meals, or the Saturday night markets, where they bought victuals for Sunday dinner, the gingerbread seller was a noisy, irresistible presence. He tempted children with “toy gingerbread” images from street life: the “cock in breeches” with “nether garments” of gold (cock fighting in those days was a popular entertainment); or “king George on Horseback,” who had a gilt crown, spurs, sword, and whose horse had a gilded saddle. Animals lent their shapes to gingerbread, too, and sheep and dogs were favorites. The London Johnny Boy, another baked figure, was not made out of gingerbread but of regular bread dough. Nonetheless, he probably inspired our stories about the gingerbread man. His little legs were so springy that he was said to have once  sprung out of the oven and escaped. Gingerbread-making was eventually recognized as a profession in itself. In the seventeenth century, gingerbread bakers had the exclusive right to make it, except at Christmas and Easter. Their street cries could be heard well into the nineteenth century, but in 1851, the writer Henry Mayhew recorded sadly that “there are only two men in London who make their own gingerbread nuts for sale in the streets.”

LEBKUCHEN TO PAIN D’EPICES

If you lived in Nuremberg in 1614, your family would have gone to the Christkindlmarkt in December. You would have bought carved Christmas decorations, special sausages, and the famous Nuremberg Lebküchen, which you probably would have thought was the best in the world. And even if you had never had gingerbread anywhere else, you just might have been right. For years, bakers in Nuremberg had access to a selection of ingredients few European cities could rival. Sugar in medieval Europe was rare and expensive. But in Nuremberg, honey flowed in abundance because groups of beekeepers had settled in the woods surrounding the city and brought their honey into town to sell in the markets. Spices were usually hard to get (pepper and ginger were the only spices that regularly appeared in English household spice records in the thirteenth century, for example) but Nuremberg was a junction of trade routes from Hungary in the east and Venice and the Mediterranean in the south. All kinds of spices were commonplace there. Nuremberg merchants, in fact, were so well known for their spices that they had the nickname “pepper sacks.” From early on, Nuremberg’s Lebküchen packed into one recipe all the variety of flavorings available to its bakers— cardamom, cloves, cinnamon, white pepper, anise, and ginger.

Nuremberg was such a powerful trading center that it attracted and motivated a class of master craftspeople who wanted to be where they could get raw materials in exchange for their finished products. There were tinfounders, diecutters, sculptors, painters, woodcutters, goldsmiths. The bakers too took pride in their craft. Lebküchen bakers, who elaborately decorated their cakes with whole cloves and colorful icing, saw themselves as artisans. Maybe wood engravers inspired them to carve forms for pressing patterns into their gingerbread; maybe the goldsmiths provided them with gold dust for their edible golden paints. Did you know that the first printed cookbook was produced there in 1485, and it contained recipes for golden cookie paint, for food coloring of many hues, and it talked about Lebküchen.

Gingerbread and Pfeffernüsse, literally, pepper nuts, were produced a little differently in each town and by each family. To some, almonds and candied citrus peel were as standard as the ginger. Sometimes the recipes did not even include ginger; then, pepper or anise gave the cakes their flavor. But among German-speaking people, as well as in France, Lebküchen, Pfeffernüsse, and pain d’épices have always been essentially honey cakes. The German word Lebküchen came from the Latin libum, the name of a special pancake that was spread with honey and offered to the Roman gods (much the way our word “libation” came from a Latin word meaning to make a liquid offering). The French pain d’épices means, literally, bread of spices.

The traditions in France were closer to the German than the English ones, with noteworthy recipes for pain d’épices coming from Dijon, Reims, and Paris. In 1571, French bakers of pain d’épices even won the right to their own guild, or professional organization, separate from the other pastry cooks and bakers.

GINGER AS MEDICINE

Gingerbread has always been a delicacy, not quite in a category with everyday breads and pastries or even other holiday cakes. Its almost magical appeal has probably been passed on since the Europeans’ first experiences with the spice when, in the Middle Ages, it was used medicinally. In the thirteenth century, apothecaries kept supplies of it. As a hot and dry substance, it could counteract an imbalance among the four humors that, in medieval medicine, were supposed to control a person’s health and temperament. Later, it was believed to relieve respiratory difficulties, strengthen weak stomachs, and expel plague, and was combined in electuaries (confections) with honey. It was also used as a food preservative—to “resist Putrefaction,” according to a 1725 English translation of the Frenchman Pierre Pomet’s Compleat History of Druggs. In fact, gingerbread did not spoil as quickly as other baked goods, which, in the days before refrigeration, was certainly somewhat magical. Gingerbread went to battle with many an army and sailed with many a ship.

ENTER THE GINGERBREAD HOUSE

During the nineteenth century, gingerbread was both modernized and romanticized. When the Grimm brothers collected volumes of German fairy tales, they found one about Hansel and Gretel, two children who, abandoned in the woods by destitute parents, discovered a house made of bread, cake, and candies. By the end of the century, the composer Englebert Humperdink wrote an opera about the boy and the girl and the gingerbread house.

Meanwhile, people in the Victorian age in England and America, and the parallel Biedermeier era, began to turn away from the colorful, bustling street-life that had been such an important part of daily life during the medieval and Elizabethan periods. As people turned to the private havens of their own homes, gingerbread came off the street into the kitchen. Perhaps at the same time people were inspired by the romantic Hansel and Gretel opera story to bake square cookies and construct houses decorated with candies like those the lost children plucked from the roof and windows of the witch’s cottage.

ANIMAL COOKIES

Factories were the reality of late nineteenth-century Europe, and the production of gingerbread became an industry. But some romanticism remained: when books were published in Germany and France evaluating baking machinery, they did not neglect gingerbread history. One shows intricate molds for fancy single cookies. Another shows a cutter that was like a watermelon-sized rolling pin and pressed relief ducks, lambs, roosters, flowers, houses, castles, horses, lords, and ladies into square cookies—albeit hundreds at a time. Smaller rolling cutters of a similar design are still made.

England had been exporting animal-shaped cookies to America since the mid 1800s, by which time Americans had  developed an appetite for fancy baked goods. We don’t know whether the animals were ginger-spiced, but by the 1870s, animals were being baked in New York and eventually became the famous American animal crackers in the bright circus boxes.

AMERICAN TASTE

By the nineteenth century, America had been baking gingerbread for decades. Although instructions for gingerbread in Martha Washington’s recipe book were very close to the breadcrumb recipe of 1615, the first cookbook printed in the new nation called for molasses and flour, which were the ingredients then used in England. That book, written by Amelia Simmons in 1796, instructs the reader to shape the dough “to your fancy.” American cookbooks tended to encourage the baker’s creativity more than the English cookbooks of the time, which usually just recommended cutting rolled dough with the rim of a glass. The New England Cookery Book of 1808 notes that dough can be stamped or cut out, and The Virginia Housewife says “plebian Gingerbread” should be cut into shapes.

Thus began a flexible, creative gingerbread tradition. American recipes usually called for fewer spices than their European counterparts, but often made use of ingredients that were only available regionally. Maple syrup gingerbreads were made in New England, and in the South, sorghum molasses was used. Waves of new immigrants added their own recipes to the American repertoire, and in 1898, The Golden Age Cookbook listed recipes for eleven spice cakes, among them Lebküchen made with honey, orange peel, and rum; a ginger layer cake using “porto Rico” molasses; gingerbread made with sour cream; and a spiced honey cake from Norway. All gingerbread makers recall the whole joyful, colorful history of gingerbread both in what they make and how they make it.

So now, you live in the 1980s and you can flavor, shape, and decorate your gingerbread as you like it.

An I had but one penny in the
world, thou should’st have it
to buy ginger-bread.”

—William Shakespeare

Love’s Labours Lost