Backwerk (spiced honey pastry, treat and provision)
Pulsnitzer Pfefferkuchen — Long-Keeping Saxon Gingerbread
PreservingReconstruction🍯 🌶️moyen40 min (plus resting)
A dense honey-rye gingerbread, loaded with ginger, cinnamon, clove, and anise, which hardens and improves with keeping: broken off on the road or crumbled into sauces.
Backwerk (spiced honey pastry, treat and provision)
A dense honey-rye gingerbread, loaded with ginger, cinnamon, clove, and anise, which hardens and improves with keeping: broken off on the road or crumbled into sauces.
Being from Leipzig, I grew up among the smell of honey and spices baked into bread throughout Saxony. This cake has a rare virtue: it keeps for weeks without losing anything, so one slips a piece into one's trunk for the long roads from Hanover to Berlin. We would knead hot honey with rye, throw in ginger, clove, and anise, and entrust the dough to the oven; nothing is lost, everything is transformed — even the crumb, which, crushed, comes to bind sauces.
Ingredients
- •Rye flour — to a firm dough (base cereal)
- •Honey — in abundance (sweetener and preservative)
- •Spice blend (ginger, cinnamon, clove, anise, coriander, cardamom) — generous (spiced signature)
- •Potash (Pottasche) — a pinch (period leavening)
- •Candied citrus peel — a little (flavor and tenderness)
How it was made : Pfefferkuchen (honey gingerbread) is an ancient specialty of central Germany, led by Nuremberg and Saxony; the town of Pulsnitz maintains a renowned tradition. Before modern chemical leavens, potash (Pottasche) from ashes was used. Very sweet and spicy, it kept for a long time, making it a choice provision.