The History of Gingerbread
Though commonplace today, ginger and gingerbread were once considered as valuable as precious gems. Thousands of years ago when the spice trade began, men, animals and ships perished in their quest to trade Asian spices for European and Middle Eastern riches. While Phoenician and Arab traders first carried ginger from Southeast Asia, it was the Romans who spread spices throughout Europe. Great, almost fanatical lovers of exotic foods, the Romans demanded spiced food whether they were at home or in their colonies such as Germany, France or Britain. Some historians believe that the first gingered breads were created by Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, who either baked honey in the breads or spread it on top.
After Rome fell, spices disappeared from Europe for hundreds of years. When the Portuguese, Dutch, British, and French began fighting for the rights to the lucrative Asian spice trade, Breads made with the very expensive ginger became a status symbol. As sugar and other cane products such as molasses were even scarcer than ginger, local honeys were always used as sweeteners.
The medieval version of gingerbread would be unrecognizable today. Bread crumbs tossed with honey and spices were dried out or baked into hard, crumbly, flat cakes. Some of the cakes were pressed into molds to form beautiful and elaborate pictures. Gingerbread men, called gingerbread husbands, became popular in northern Britain. Considered a gift fit for or from a king, or an appropriate ending to a great banquet, huge slabs of gingerbread were gilded with real gold and studded decoratively with gold-dipped cloves. Dark gingerbreads got their reddish-brown color from sandalwood or red wine, while white gingerbread was actually ginger-flavored marzipan.
By the end of the Middle Ages, gingerbread has greatly evolved. Cakes similar to today's cookies had made their debut to great acclaim and were just inexpensive enough for common folk to afford on special occasions - ungilded, of course. Gingerbread vendors were often the most popular attraction at medieval fairs. Sandalwood and red wine had given way to licorice, then to molasses (called treacle in England). In the late sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth I employed a full time gingerbread baker. Some of the old gingerbread molds are still used today in Queen Elizabeth II's kitchens.
The beginning of Europe's relationship with its neighbors across the Atlantic made gingerbread accessible to everyone. Imported sugarcane and spice plants thrived in the Caribbean, bringing prices down. Hard gingerbreads were joined by the more delicate cakes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The cakes were often toasted and eaten for breakfast or served with coffee or tea. Both cakes and cookies became American favorites, especially in Louisiana, where molasses was produced, and in New England. The hardest gingerbreads, Louisiana's molasses-laden estomac mulatre (mulatto's stomach) and New England's glazed muster gingerbread, wee especially valued since they could be kept for weeks without spoiling. In her lifetime, Emily Dickinson was praised as much for her gingerbread as for her poetry. Most modern cookies and cakes were developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; and all of today's recipes are merely variations on those.