Fresh ginger cake and fairytales of one kind and another

The delicately pretty, thin-skinned, fresh ginger from Towani Organic Farm at the market this fall has inspired us to make a ginger cake and to reflect on some of gingerbread’s appearances in history and literature.

Ginger was one of the spices that inspired the spice trade between the Roman Empire and China in the second century.  It later became a staple of Medieval European food, which was much more highly spiced than it would later become. By the early fifteenth century in England, it arrived regularly on boats from the Mediterranean and by the sixteenth, it appeared routinely in cook books and medical guides.  Often in powdered or candied form, since it is relatively perishable, ginger flavored savory and sweet dishes, and provided various medicinal benefits, including “comforting the heart,” aiding the digestion, cleansing and warming the body, countering inflammation, and heightening desire.  

 



When Sir Toby Belch, in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, famously calls out the "puritan" Malvolio —

Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?

— and the Clown chimes in:

Yes, by Saint Anne, and ginger shall be hot i' th' mouth too! 

—he seems to be referring to the use of ginger to heat up the bodily passions Malvolio censures.  

By the sixteenth century, ginger was a crucial ingredient in what had become a cherished food, ginger bread or cake. Many historical accounts of gingerbread on the internet repeat the story that Queen Elizabeth I presented guests with gingerbread likenesses of themselves.  This even appears as the assertion that Queen Elizabeth “invented” the gingerbread man.  Unfortunately, we haven't been able to find the source for such a story, as proves to be the case with many of the juiciest and most beloved anecdotes about Elizabeth. What we can assert with confidence is that, while Elizabeth was a Renaissance woman with great erudition and many talents, a baker she was not.   Now, there is certainly widespread evidence that early modern cooks shaped marzipan, sugar, and various doughs into representations of flora and fauna, ships and buildings, and, indeed, people.  So it is at least possible that Elizabeth sometimes asked her cooks to make portraits of expected visitors out of gingerbread.  It is appealing to imagine the queen greeting a diplomat, suitor, or courtier with a tiny edible version of himself.  “Sweets to the sweet,” she might have said, “but keep in mind that I could bite your head off.”

Whether or not the sweet-toothed queen shaped the history of gingerbread, the drama that is often considered one of the delicacies of her reign makes frequent mention of gingerbread.  The playwright and poet Ben Jonson, famous for his appetite, among other things, dreamed up a gingerbread gag for a character in one play, and in another, depicted a gingerbread seller at a fair, with her basket full of “gingerbread progeny” and a young man who buys her out, seduced by the pleasures of the fair including his “gingerbread-wife.”

In fairy tales, gingerbread also has a special status if one that is, again, hard to track down.  In the Grimm Brothers’ “Hansel and Gretel,” a story all about hunger, the mother (only later revised into the stepmother, to the chagrin of stepmothers since) proposes that the solution to the family’s poverty and starvation is to leave the two children in the woods.  There, they come upon a witch’s house, “built entirely from bread with a roof made of cake.” While the German might specify that this is “ginger bread or cake” that detail is not in most English versions of the tale. Nonetheless, many illustrations depict the witch’s house as the prototype for the lovely but inedible gingerbread houses that are now a standard part of Christmas decorations.  Underpinning the assumption that the witch’s house is gingerbread is the assumption that gingerbread is the treat most mouth-watering and irresistible to starving, abandoned children, the food of childhood dreams.

So formidable queens and witches haunt this recipe for ginger cake, adapted from the one in David Lebovitz's wonderful book, Ready for Dessert.  While we love recipes that combine ginger in various forms (fresh, dried, and candied), we chose this one to showcase the young ginger turning up at the market, ginger that has not even yet produced thick skin and tough fibers.  The recipe is available elsewhere on the internet but we will repeat it here for convenience.

David Lebovitz’s Fresh Ginger Cake

4 ounces fresh ginger, peeled and sliced
1 cup mild molasses
1 cup sugar
1 cup vegetable oil
2 1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
1 cup water
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 eggs, at room temperature

1. Preheat over to 350°F. Put rack in the center of the oven. Butter a 9 inch springform or 9 x 2-inch round cake pan and line the bottom with a circle of baking parchment.
2. Using a food processor or knife chop the ginger very fine.  You could also use a microplane to grate it.  We used the processor. 
3. In a large bowl, mix together the molasses, sugar, and oil.
4. In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, cinnamon, cloves and black pepper.
5. Bring the water to the boil in a saucepan, stir in the baking soda, and then mix the hot water into the molasses mixture. Stir in the ginger.
6. Sift the dry ingredients over the batter, then whisk to combine.
7. Add the eggs, and continue whisking until thoroughly blended.
8. Scrape the batter into the prepared cake pan and bake for about 1 hour, until the top of the cake springs back lightly when pressed or a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.  (Check after 50 minutes.  You don’t want to overbake it.)
10. Cool the cake completely. Run a knife around the edge of the cake to loosen it from the pan.  Invert it onto a plate, remove the parchment, and then reinvert it onto a serving plate.

We served this with unsweetened whipped cream and a sauce we canned this summer made from Good Humus Royal Blenheim apricots (basically a very loose jam). The cake has a very strong, pure ginger taste and is, indeed, "hot in the mouth."   We like to think that Queen Elizabeth would approve--and Malvolio would not.