Skip to main content
Dessert

A Good Recipe for Gingerbread

A gingerbread dough made with flour, butter, caraway, ginger, coriander, sugar, and treacle.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Ginger and coriander match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,505 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

A Good Recipe for Gingerbread

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a quick oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare

  1. Preheat your oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. In a large bowl, rub the butter into the flour until well combined.

Make the dough

  1. Add the caraway seeds, ginger, coriander seeds, and fine sugar, and mix well.

  2. Stir in the treacle until the mixture is smooth.

  3. Roll the dough out thinly, about the thickness of a coin.

Shape and bake

  1. Cut into desired shapes and place on a baking sheet.

  2. Bake in the preheated oven until golden brown.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Ginger + coriandertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  2. Caraway + coriandertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together185 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-decenal (green, must).

  3. Flour + carawaytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Caraway + gingertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together288 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Fine flour
Provides the structure that holds the dough together and gives the baked gingerbread its body.
Butter
Coats the flour particles and adds richness and a tender texture.
Treacle
Adds sweetness, moisture, and a dark colour, and helps the gingerbread brown.
Fine sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the gingerbread brown during baking.
Ginger
Adds the warm, spicy aroma and flavour that define gingerbread.

The step that matters

Bake until golden brown. Treacle and sugar darken quickly in a hot oven. Watch closely, because once they scorch the gingerbread turns bitter, and underbaking leaves it soft and pale.

Swap the coriander

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, caraway, ginger, sugar):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Corianderthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, caraway, ginger, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

More gingerbread recipes

Soft 197Cake 72Nuts 68Molasses 52Pudding 38Cookies 36 See all 364 →

You might also like

Ginger CookiesGinger Cookies213 recipesGinger CakeGinger Cake93 recipesSoft Ginger BreadSoft Ginger Bread85 recipesSoft Ginger CakeSoft Ginger Cake56 recipes