The Evening Treat
Molasses Gingerbread Men
Street foodDocumented🍯 🌶️facile45 min
Small dark dough figures, spiced with ginger and sweetened with molasses, baked until tender-firm. A frontier child's treat, made with almost nothing.
Why this dish? During an 1858 debate against Stephen Douglas, Lincoln recounted that as a poor child, his mother once made him gingerbread men; an even poorer boy traded his own, saying he loved gingerbread more than anyone yet received so little. The famous anecdote ties this cake to his childhood.
When I was a boy, receiving gingerbread men was a whole celebration. My mother would knead flour with a little molasses and ginger, and shape little men that we children held like treasure. I remember a boy poorer than myself who traded me his, saying he loved gingerbread more than anyone in the world — and received less than anyone. Those words I never forgot.
Ingredients
- •Wheat flour — full bowl (base)
- •Molasses — a good splash (sweetener)
- •Ground ginger — a spoonful (signature spice)
- •Saleratus (baking soda) — a pinch (leavening)
- •Lard or butter — a walnut-sized piece (tenderness)
How it was made : On the frontier, refined sugar was expensive: sweetening came from molasses or sorghum syrup. Leavening was not modern baking powder but saleratus (potassium bicarbonate), sold in blocks. Spices like ginger, imported, made gingerbread an affordable luxury.
Sources : Lincoln-Douglas debates, 1858 (gingerbread anecdote recounted by Lincoln) · Rae Katherine Eighmey, Abraham Lincoln in the Kitchen, Smithsonian Books, 2014