Gingerbread, like a great book, is best when shared. We create gingerbread cookies, houses and cake to make our family smile. Memorable gingerbread houses are built with patience, imagination, and children, not expensive equipment.
Gingerbread history has been appearing in accounts of ordinary people’s daily lives since the beginning of written history. Decorative shapes seem always to have been part of the history. The commanding flavor of ginger attracts the palate’s attention so completely; your little baker can count on the cookie having a delicious flavor, spending quality time in the kitchen decorating.
Here is a bit of gingerbread history and a few books to share as you bake with your children.
Gingerbread History
We have inherited gingerbread from many countries, sometimes a soft cake, brittle cookie, light, dark, sweet spicy and almost always cut into shapes and colorfully decorated or stamped we have made gingerbread traditions our own.
London 1614:
All year long during special feasts, holidays and fairs there was always gingerbread. For example “Fair buttons” were baked for the Easter Pleasure Fair in Norwich. A gingerbread stick was traditional at the Ashbourne Fair in Derbyshire in August. Gingerbread wafers were eaten with cheese and ale in September Barnstable Fair in Devonshire. In Yorkshire, on Christmas Eve, children went from house to house visiting, singing and begging for pennies, and Yule ginger cake.
Nuremberg 1614:
Families would go to Christkindlmarkt in December and eat the famous Nuremberg Lebkuchen, which was famous gingerbread because for years bakers in Nuremberg had access to a selection of ingredients that few European cities had. Sugar in medieval Europe was rare and expensive. Nuremberg had an abundance of honey. Nuremberg also was a junction of trade routes from Hungary in the east and Venice and the Mediterranean in south. Nuremberg merchants were well known for their spices. From early on Nuremberg’s Lebkuchen recipe had cardamom, cloves, cinnamon, white pepper, anise and ginger. Lubkuchen bakers elaborately decorated their cakes with whole cloves and colorful icing; they made gingerbread baking, an art form.
France 1571:
Recipes for pain d’epices (gingerbread) from Dijon, Reims, and Paris were so tasty and sot after, the bakers of gingerbread had their own professional organization; separate from all other pastry cooks and bakers.
Nineteenth Century: The Gingerbread House
Gingerbread was modernized when the Grimm brothers collected volumes of German fair tales and found one about Hansel and Gretel, a brother and sister who were abandoned in the woods, and discovered a house made of gingerbread and candies. An opera was written and the tale grew as people in the Victorian age, in both England and America turned to private home baking. A family past time of baking square cookies and constructing houses decorated with candies became part of many holiday traditions.
The first cookbook printed in our new nation, written by Amelia Simmons in 1796, called for molasses and flour and instructs the reader to shape the dough “to your fancy.” The New EnglandCookery Book of 1808 told the reader that the dough could be stamped or cut out, and the Virginia Housewife said “plebian Gingerbread” should be cut into shapes.
-And now, you can flavor, shape and decorate gingerbread as you like,
R.R.Cratty
Gingerbread books:
- Gingerbread Land by Katie Grim and Jake Johnson
- The Gingerbread Girl Goes Animal Crackers by Lisa Campbell Ernst
- Gingerbread Friends by Jan Brett
- Gingerbread Baby by Jan Brett
- The Gingerbread Man by Jim Aylesworth and Barbara McClintock
- Gingerbread Houses by Christa Currie
- The Gingerbread Man (Easy-to-Read Folktales) by Karen Schmidt
- No Bake Gingerbread Houses for Kids by Lisa Anderson and Zac Williams
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