Briggs' account of adapting a gingerbread recipe from 1890 is good (not clean at all - so much flour so much) fun!

History of Gingerbread | The History Kitchen | PBS F...

Plus Tori Avey on the broader history of gingerbread for PBS

(I love gingerbread)

BVC Eats: Gramma Dornfeld’s molasses gingerbreadplus this post by Jennifer Stevenson for the BVC Eats blog

Which has a note I think is interesting and that reminds me of a lot of things I think of when I encounter people interacting with older recipes: the bit about crisco working better.

A lot of the time older recipes from people in our broader communities are optimized for ingredients that were cheap/er than ingredients we might think of as richer or better quality.

I think it's important to recognize that you can't just, say, substitute one for one "real butter" for the crisco (or other industrially hydrogenated) in a recipe like that, bc butter and crisco are not identical

They have some different properties

And the people whose lives and writing shape ours were often informally expert in exploiting those properties

And making a virtue (the perfect gingerbread crumb) out of what might very well have been necessity (crisco is often overall cheaper than butter, and it's easier to keep from going rancid).

I am not in any way trying to decry experimentation and change! But I think that will often go better if we also remember that the people who wrote down or otherwise passed on their favorite recipes were also people with experience and expertise, who were thinking, and experimenting, and changing.

*industrially hydrogenated fat

I love gingerbread soooo much! With real whipped cream.

it's so good with whipped cream