Gingerbread

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Gingerbread is a spiced sweet bread.

It can be in the form of a soft risen cake, a flat hard cookie, or an actual quick-bread. It can be darker or lighter. When made as a cookie, it is often cut into shapes.

The sweetener used is often molasses or dark brown sugar. The ginger in it may be fresh, minced, or powdered, or both. There may be other spices as well, but the dominant taste is ginger.

For cookies, the other ingredients are flour, baking soda, and butter.

Other old forms of spice cookies are Speculaas cookies and Lebkuchen.

Gingerbread houses are more popular in Germany and North America than they are in the UK.


History
Ginger was reintroduced into Europe during the Middle Ages. It had been gone from Europe since the fall of Rome.

In the Middle Ages, Gingerbread was often a special treat that you bought and ate at fairs. At many villages in England, the tradition was that eating a gingerbread man would help you get a husband. If the fair was held on a saint's day, there might be the image of a saint stamped on the Gingerbread.

In the 1600s in England, a special baker's guild had the exclusive right to make gingerbread (except at Easter and Christmas.)

At one point during the Middle Ages, many recipes for Gingerbread were actually just spice bread -- with no ginger in them, and they weren't much like bread. It was more like a toffee, made of honey and breadcrumbs (but no flour) and spices, then spread out, allowed to harden and then cut into squares.

In Germany, though, the Gingerbread habit was the strongest, especially in Nuremberg, The guild there was called the "Lebkuchler", they made "Lebkuchen." Today's Lebkuchen don't have ginger in them.

In the American south, sorghum molasses would be used in making Gingerbread; in the north-east, maple syrup.

Literature & Lore
An I had but one penny in the world, thou should'st have it to buy ginger-bread."

-- William Shakespeare, Love's Labours Lost.




"They fette hym first the sweete wyn,
And mede eek in a mazelyn,
And roial spicerye,
And gyngebreed that was ful fyn,
And lycorys, and eek comyn,
With sugre that is so trye."
-- Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1343 - 1400), Tale of Sir Thopas.		They brought him first the sweet wine,
And mead within a maselyn,
And royal spicery
Of gingerbread that was full fine,
Cumin and licorice, I opine,
And sugar so dainty.


Language Notes
Gingerbread actually comes from the Old French word for "ginger", "gingebras", which in turn came from the Roman word, "Zingiber."

Also called:
Pain d'épice (French); Pan de jengibre (Spanish); Pão de gengibre (Portuguese) Top...