Christmas—my favorite time of the year. One of the many things associated with the Christmas season is gingerbread.
What Is It
Gingerbread covers a broad range of baked goods. From crisp cookies to moist cakes, gingerbread is any baked good, seasoned with cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and ginger, and sweetened with molasses, honey, or treacle.
In Old French, it was called “gigembras,” which means “gingered food.” In Middle English (spoken roughly from 1150-1450 A.D.), the term became “gyngebreed” (preserved ginger) which eventually evolved into “gingerbread.”
Did You Know…
- The ancient Chinese cultivated the ginger root as a medical treatment.
- Ginger is not only tasty, but its properties helped preserve the bread.
- Nuns in thirteenth-century Sweden baked gingerbread to help relieve indigestion.
History
Ginger has been seasoning foodstuffs and drinks for thousands of years. The origins of gingerbread trace back to the ancient Egyptians, who used it for ceremonial purposes. But the first known gingerbread recipe comes from the Greeks around 2400 B.C.
At the end of the tenth century, the Persian Army chased Gregory Makar, an Armenian monk (who later became a saint), from the ancient city of Nicopolis (today’s modern-day Anatolia, Turkey). He traveled across Europe before finally settling in the Loire Valley region in north-central France. With him came the spices and the knowledge to make gingerbread, and for the rest of his life, he taught French Christians the art of making it. After his death, gingerbread gradually spread across Europe and eventually to the U.S.
Did You Know…
- Monks in the Middle Ages often carved biblical scenes or saints into gingerbread before baking it. These treats offered religious teachings while feeding the hungry.
- Painting gingerbread cookies to be used as window decorations became popular in Sweden in the thirteenth century.
- Europeans considered gingerbread a form of art.
- By the fifteenth century, meals ended with a sweet course, often gingerbread, which aided digestion and sweetened the breath.
- During the 1500s, cooks often added fragrant ginger or crumbled gingerbread to recipes to mask the smell of preserved meat.
- In many European countries, gingerbread baking was a profession with its own section in the bakers’ guild.
- England’s Henry VIII (reign 1509-1547) supposedly used a ginger concoction in hopes of building a resistance to the plague.
- Queen Elizabeth I of England (reign 1558-1603) served gingerbread cookies made to resemble the dignitaries visiting her court.
- Beginning in the 1600s, English monasteries and pharmacies sold gingerbread.
- In the seventeenth-century, only professional gingerbread makers could make gingerbread, except for at Easter and Christmas.
Gingerbread Houses
Gingerbread cookies took various shapes. Some of the more popular shapes in Europe included stars, hearts, soldiers, swords, and animals, and could be bought in special shops and seasonal markets.
Then, sometime between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the holiday practice of making and decorating gingerbread houses began in Germany. Their popularity rose with the Brothers Grimm story of Hansel and Gretel (published in 1812), and today is firmly entrenched as a Christmas tradition.
Did You Know…
- The house in Hansel and Gretel was made from bread, not gingerbread, and had a cake roof and sugar windows.
- Gingerbread houses spread to Britain sometime during the 1800s.
- According to Guinness World Records, the world’s largest gingerbread house was built in Bryan, Texas, in 2015, to help raise money for a local hospital. The finished house covered 2,520 square-feet (about half the size of a tennis court). It used 7,200 eggs; 1,800 pounds of butter; 2,925 pounds of brown sugar; 7,200 pounds of all-purpose flour; 1,080 ounces of ground ginger; and a few other ingredients. It contained 35.8 million calories.
- Royal gingerbread cookies often featured intricate details and elaborate gold leaf designs. Because of this, the intricate architectural details on Victorian-era houses is called “gingerbread,” while the white architectural details on many colonial American seaside homes is referred to as “gingerbread work.”
America
In the past, gingerbread wasn’t reserved just for Christmas. It played a role in Americans’ everyday life, too, including politics.
Did You Know…
- Mary Ball Washington, George Washington’s mother, served the Marquis de Lafayette her home-baked soft gingerbread when he visited her Fredericksburg, Virginia home. Her recipe was known there after in the Washington family as Gingerbread Lafayette.
- Candidates in Virginia used gingerbread cookies to sway voters.
- In 1875, St. Nicholas Magazine’s May issue released The Gingerbread Man fairytale. (“Run, run, run as fast as you can, you can’t catch me, I’m the gingerbread man!”)
- The gingerbread man in The Gingerbread Man fairytale was depicted as a holiday treat eventually eaten by a hungry fox.
- The first known American cookbook, American Cookery by Amelia Simmons, contained three types of gingerbread recipes.