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Dessert

Hard Gingerbread

A firm gingerbread dough made with butter, sugar, eggs, spices, and flour, rolled and baked into cookies.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Hard Gingerbread

Why it works: Ginger and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,324 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Hard Gingerbread

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the dough

  1. Preheat your oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. In a large bowl, cream together the butter and sugar until smooth. Beat in the eggs one at a time.

  3. Mix in the cream of tartar and baking soda. Add ginger and nutmeg to taste.

  4. Gradually add flour until the dough is firm enough to roll.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll out the dough and cut into desired shapes.

  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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

Butter
Creams with sugar to give the dough richness and a tender texture.
Sugar
Creams with butter for sweetness and helps the cookies brown as they bake.
Eggs
Bind the dough and add structure and moisture to the cookies.
Cream of tartar
Acidifies the dough, helping keep the texture tender and stable.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic cream of tartar to produce gas that lifts the cookies.

The step that matters

Gradually add flour until the dough is firm enough to roll. Adding too much flour makes the cookies dry and tough, while too little leaves the dough sticky and hard to shape. Adding it gradually lets you stop once the dough holds its shape.

Swap the ginger

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, egg, cream, nutmeg, flour. 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.

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