Welcome to day 2 of the #EarlyModernPeriod🩸 cooking challenge. Today's recipe is Hannahg Glasse's Short Gingerbread (1747). After yesterday's Pork-Pye success, I have high hopes for this one. 
.@solveig_hanson and I were unsure if the ginger in this recipe would be powdered or fresh. Thankfully @rare_cooking had the answer: around the time this recipe was written, most ginger in England came from Jamaica, either fresh or pickled. 2/ rarecooking.com/2015/12/09/to-…
If you've baked before, you'll notice that this recipe is missing 2 key cookie ingredients: eggs and leavening agent. This means the dough is dry & won't rise much in the oven. The huge amount of ginger (almost 50g) does bring just enough moisture that the dough comes together.3/
For the record, this is 225g sugar, 225g flour, 117.5g butter, 42g grated ginger, and a hearty sprinkle of caraway seeds. My hypothesis is that the result will be tasty, but very crumbly and useless for dunking in tea. We'll see what happens once we roll it out.
Amazingly, it rolled out okay! I cut it into little circles using a glass and popped it in the oven at 350F/180C. We shall see what comes out.
They're out & cool. Surprisingly they aren't short. Instead, they're crisp & chewy (a little tough for me, I might have overworked them). The ginger flavour is strong (but I like that) and the caraway seed works and makes for attractive little flecks. Great with a cup of tea!!
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
　
