We thought this week, as we approach Christmas weekend, we’d share some fun facts about one of our beloved holiday foods, gingerbread. Perhaps you baked and decorated some gingerbread men or built a house with some of the young people in your family to celebrate the holiday. Many of us now just use kits or mixes for our gingerbread, but what we create really bears little resemblance to the gingerbread our ancestors knew.
Gingerbread was popular throughout Europe for centuries. Ginger root came from China, where it was used for its medicinal properties, especially for indigestion. A form of gingerbread appeared in both Greek and Egyptian early history. As trade increased between East and West, ginger was more available, and by the Middle Ages, its strong flavor was used to disguise the taste of meat that might not have been very fresh. (Image from Wikimedia Commons; public domain)
Originally, gingerbread consisted of breadcrumbs, sugar, and spices boiled with honey and wine. The resulting paste was shaped, often in cast iron or wooden molds, and decorated. In the beginning, the ingredients were expensive, so gingerbread was a luxury saved for special occasions. Modern gingerbread broke free of its earliest ingredients when flour became more accessible and with the invention of reliable baking powders and ovens that were easy to regulate.
Gingerbread History
The earliest known English recipe dates from the late fourteenth century and calls for the cook to “Take good honey and clarify it on the fire, and take fair white bread and grate it, and cast it into the boiling honey, and stir it well together fast with a slice that it burn not to the vessel, and then take it down and put therein ginger, long pepper [from India and a bit hotter than common pepper], and sanders [sandlewood, used as a red food coloring], and temper it up with thine hands, and then put it in a flat box and strew thereon sugar, and stick therein cloves round about the edge and in the middle if it please you.” (from the British Heritage article cited below)
The cookies were hard, not soft like ours usually are; they were fantastically shaped and lavishly decorated. In many countries of Europe, there were festivals called Gingerbread Fairs and the cookies (or as the British call them, biscuits) sold there were called “fairings.” Gingerbread became such an important and wide-ranging product that there were actually distinct gingerbread baking guilds throughout Europe. In fact, in the seventeenth century, only professional gingerbread bakers could make it except at Christmas and Easter, when home cooks could bake gingerbread as well.
Gingerbread Houses and More
Gingerbread houses came to us from Germany. No one is quite certain whether the Brothers Grimm in writing “Hansel and Gretel,” began the tradition or if they wrote about a phenomenon that had already begun, but there is no doubt that the two children who found their way into an edible candy-coated house in a forest increased the popularity of creating gingerbread houses.
Gingerbread made its way to America with the English colonists, who seemed to have favored the softer version that we usually prefer today. German colonists brought their gingerbread house-building talents when they arrived.
And why do we call it gingerbread when it’s not really bread at all? In Middle English, the word for a whole bread was “loaf,” but when it was broken up, it was called “bread.” Early gingerbread was made of breadcrumbs, or broken bread, hence its name. So, whether you get into baking your own gingerbread treat or just enjoy a gingerbread cookie with your coffee over the holidays, you can justify the time, effort, and calories knowing that our ancestors through the centuries treasured the tradition of gingerbread making.
Additional Information . . .
“Gilding the Gingerbread,” by Claire Hopley, British Heritage, October/November 1988, pgs. 47–50.
“Gingerbread: The Romantic Medieval History and Its Festive Use Today,” by Samantha Pires, My Modern Met, 24 December 2020, https://mymodernmet.com/medieval-gingerbread/
“The History of Gingerbread,” by Tori Avery, 20 December 2013, The History Kitchen, PBS Food, https://www.pbs.org/food/the-history-kitchen/history-gingerbread/
“History of Gingerbread,” Confectionary Chalet, 2021, https://www.confectionarychalet.com/history-of-gingerbread/
From all of us at St. Louis Genealogical Society . . .
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