When we asked readers to send their favorite gingerbreads to the Recipe Box Project, the cakes and the personal stories filled our inbox. Yes, you can make a great cake from a good recipe. But a recipe that was found blowing around a parking lot in Maine 35 years ago - which one reader sent us - well, that must indeed evoke memories.
Gingerbreads are the hallmark of New England baking, mainly because the main ingredient, molasses, is so tightly woven into our history. Colonists used molasses as their primary sweetener, according to “The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink.’’ By the late 17th century, molasses (along with cotton wool, rum, and sugar) was being shipped from the Caribbean to Rhode Island in exchange for pork, beer, butter, and cider. The dark sweetener was used to brew beer and distill rum. “In the early 1700s,’’ writes Robert Brower in the “Oxford Companion,’’ “rum made in New England became an essential element in a highly profitable triangular trade across the Atlantic. The [Colonists] exported rum to West Africa in trade for slaves; the ships brought the slaves from Africa to the French West Indies, trading them for more molasses and sugar; these products were then shipped to New England to make more rum.’’
The molasses plot thickens. The trade hurt British farmers in the Caribbean, a subsequent Molasses Act imposed a tax on the ingredient for Colonists, and eventually the price of molasses rose so high, writes Brower, that cooks turned to maple syrup.
But the longing for the taste of molasses continued in dishes such as Boston baked beans and Boston brown bread. Indian pudding, gingersnap cookies, hermits, and Anadama bread all call for it, and of course gingerbread is entirely different without it (one reader sent us an interesting cake that uses golden syrup in place of molasses). With its dark color, sludgy texture, and distinctive burnt caramel-y flavor, molasses gives gingerbread its distinct characteristics.
