Ginger bread recipe
Annotation
This late-seventeenth century recipe for gingerbread shows how colonization in the Atlantic world changed what men and women in England would have eaten. The recipe includes ginger and sugar. While both of these commodities were known by Europeans prior to Columbus’s journeys to the New World, they were often grown on Caribbean plantations for export to Europe. In turn, increasing supply of these and other crops altered the labor performed in kitchens by English housekeepers and revolutionized the diets of all Britons. Students can browse other early modern cookbooks digitized by the Folger Shakespeare Library in order to uncover their own histories of the global trade in foodstuffs.
This source is a part of the A Human History of Commodities teaching module.
Text
To make Ginger bread
Take 3 pound & half of Flower dry it well before the fire, and put to it 2 ounces of beaten ginger, one of Carriway seeds and one of Coliander seeds with a quarter of a pound of sugar rub into it a pound of butter till it will crumble like grated bread then worke it well together with 2 pound of treakle, make it in little cakes and bake them in a pritty quick oven.
Credits
Wilkinson, Vere. "To make gingerbread." Choyce receits collected out of the book of receits, of the Lady Vere Wilkinson [manuscript] / begun to be written by the Right Honble the Lady Anne Carr. Ed. Anne Carr. England, 2674. 89. Handwritten. https://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/detail/FOLGER~3~3~15394~271610:Choyce-receits-collected-out-of-the?qvq=q:ginger&mi=11&trs=1090#
Transcriptions made by Shakespeare's World volunteers (shakespearesworld.org), participants in EMROC classes and transcribathons (emroc.hypotheses.org), participants in Folger paleography classes and transcribathons, and Folger docents.