- Welcome, I'm Suzanne Corbett. I'm a foodways interpreter with the Ulysses Grant Historic Site. I'm stirring up something fun today for the holidays. Something that the general or I should say the lieutenant when he was here enjoyed. It was one of his favorite cakes, ginger cake. And this ginger cake is very special because it's a light spongy cake as you can see, not the hard ginger crackers or cookeries that you might associate with gingerbread. But gingerbread was so popular that it was eaten all year long. Just not reserved for the holidays. No, no, no, no. And it's a very simple recipe to do and anybody could make it as long as you had a few simple ingredients. All you needed was molasses or in this part of the country you might've used sorghum molasses, which is still another grain that is crushed or say a grass that is crushed and then cooked to get the essence the sweet syrup out of it. And we're using a whole cup worth of this along with all about a quarter pound of butter or lard and mixing it together until it's nice and smooth. Now, the spices you would have had, kind of costly. So it was one of these types of recipes that you wanted to be sure that people enjoy the full flavor of these costly ingredients and we have ginger and cinnamon. Sift it into my batter. Mix it around. Don't get too wild. It'll fly out just like it did there. Add in a couple of eggs. And these are actually about the size of what an egg would have been in that timeframe when the Grant's lived here. Eggs were smaller, milk was richer. So if you're doing this today you really wouldn't wanna use an extra large egg. A large egg would be fine or better yet a medium egg. Stir that around. Now this particular recipe dates all the way to 1820 but there was one cook, one baker that Grant particularly enjoyed her gingerbread and her name was Lucy Latimer. Lucy was attached to one of his generals as his cook and he stole her just because of how well she did her gingerbread, asked if she wouldn't come and make gingerbread for him. And when he was elected to the white house, he took Lucy with him and her gingerbread was well thought of so much that she stayed on and baked for President Hayes all the way through the Cleveland administration where she varied the recipe just a little bit and added buttermilk instead of water. Now this, I just add a little bit of extra water to this to thin down the batter. And then we'll add in enough flour to make a nice stiff dough, that's about two cups. Any cook would know how much would be added into your mix. Stir until it looked right. It was stiff. Now, flour of this white would have been reserved for finer white cakes. Most of the flour of the day would have been more of a whole wheat unbleached. But the finer grades really didn't come about until the 1870s when the ruling system of the flour mills improved the texture and the color. This is looking good. It's just simply stirred about and then baked in a hot fire in a pan until it's set and dry. The fire is good, it'll take about 30 minutes to do. Spread it out. Bake it. Now, if I'm working out of a hearth like we have here I would use a smaller pan that would fit directly into my dutch oven. Add it, add your lid, put a little bit of the hot coals on the top of it to keep the heat even and then I would slide it back into the hearth on a spider, which is an implement that has three legs, a long handle that I could move in and out of the fire to control the heat. Then once it's baked, cool it off, slice it up and then serve it to Grant. The lieutenant would definitely like it.