Mary Washington's gingerbread recipe

This recipe has been handed down through the generations and was a favorite of our first president, George Washington.

Thu, Dec 15 2011 at 2:30 PM

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Recipes, Christmas

Photo: bertel/flickr

I have a great love of history and always have. I often love to read about food from past times as well, so I was thrilled to find this recipe that Mary Washington made for both her son, George, and also General Lafayette. Gingerbread is one of the happy traditions that we have kept today.

Reading through Mary's recipe made me instantly hungry. The addition of the orange in the gingerbread is brilliant. As a cook, I thought it very interesting to see the few differences in method. For example, the "soda" is dissolved in water before it is stirred into the batter. I assume that their baking soda was a little different than ours. She also mentions that raisins make a "good addition", something I never would have thought of putting into my gingerbread.

Mary Washington's Gingerbread recipe:

"Cut up in a pan 1/2 cup of nice sweet butter with 1/2 cup of brown sugar. Beat to a cream with a paddle. Add 1 cup of the very best India molasses and 1/2 cup of warm milk. To this add 2 teaspoons of finely powdered ginger and 1 heaping teaspoon of cinnamon, mace and nutmeg (powdered and mixed), and 1 wine glass of brandy.

Beat 3 eggs till very light and thick, 3 cups of flour and 1 teaspoon of cream of tartar sifted with the flour and stirred alternately with the beaten eggs into the batter. Last, mix in the juice and grated rind of 1 large, ripe orange. Dissolve 1 teaspoon of soda in a little warm water and stir in. Beat until very light. A cup of large seeded raisins is a good addition. Bake in a moderate oven until done. Serve with brandy or lemon sauce."

Source: Naturally Delicious Desserts and Snacks by Faye Martin, published 1978 by Rodale Press, INC.

If you'd like to try this recipe, I was able to find this recipe with more modern instructions here. I am considering trying it myself. It sounds so delicious!

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Comments: 2

token girl May 12 2013 at 2:18 PM

I'm thinking more along the lines of holding off on the chemical reaction of the baking soda to the cream of tartar & moisture. Those two ingredients are the basic makeup of baking powder which reacts with the moisture to create the leavening action. As for the 250 year difference I agree to an extent. While baking soda is sodium bicarbonate not matter how you break it down, I suspect that 250 years ago it was a raw mineral that was mined as opposed to produced through chemistry as it is most

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commonly practiced now.

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Raky Jan 02 2013 at 1:51 PM

I have the suspicion that dissolving the baking soda in water is a simple consequence of not mixing it in with the flour before that's added in, something that seems standard today. Otherwise if you just add dry baking soda into the batter, it won't mix in well, and you'll get pockets of undissolved or barely-dissolved soda. So it's probably not that the baking soda itself has changed in the last 250 years, but that we mix it with dry ingredients instead of putting it in at the

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end.