Skip to main content
Dessert

Thick Ginger Bread

A dense gingerbread loaf made with treacle, butter, brown sugar, flour, ginger powder, allspice, baking soda, eggs, and warm milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Ginger and allspice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,620 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Thick Ginger Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a bowl, combine flour, sugar, ginger, and allspice.

  2. Warm the butter and add it along with the treacle to the dry ingredients.

Make the dough

  1. Warm the milk, dissolve the baking soda in it, and mix it into the bowl with the whisked eggs to form a smooth dough.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture into a buttered tin and bake for 1 hour or longer.

  2. If the gingerbread is very thick, brush the top with a beaten egg yolk mixed with a little milk before finishing baking.

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 + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,620 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + allspicetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,302 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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

Treacle
Adds sweetness, dark colour and a moist, sticky texture.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the gingerbread together as it bakes.
Eggs
Bind the dough and add structure and richness to the crumb.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic treacle to produce gas, helping the gingerbread rise.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and richness in the crumb.

The step that matters

Dissolving the baking soda in the milk. Baking soda needs to be evenly dispersed in the wet mixture so it reacts with the acidic treacle throughout the dough. Uneven mixing leaves pockets of bitter alkali and patchy rising.

Swap the allspice

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Allspicethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, flour, ginger, egg, milk. 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