Food
Bee Wilson prefers home-baked gingerbread
Published 16 December 2002
A Starbucks gingerbread latte tastes like a robot's idea of home cooking
In these supposedly frantic times, when we are all so busy, busy, busy and have no time to do anything but spend our lives making decisions in shops and cafes, even the smells of Christmas come ready-manufactured. Crabtree & Evelyn sells "Noel" room fragrance, to make your house feel as if you were the kind of person who fashions their own wreaths and nogs their own eggs. Farther down the street, Starbucks jollies you to drink a gingerbread latte, all spicy aromas and sickly aftertaste. It is truly horrible. Gingerbread latte tastes like a robot's idea of home cooking, with cinnamon a poor substitute for love.
Gingerbread is a lovely thing at Christmastime. But it cannot be reduced to a spice syrup poured into milky coffee. For one thing, the original point of gingerbread was not spice, but honey. Ancient honey cakes were made from a thick paste of honey and flour, or honey and breadcrumbs, and baked in special decorative moulds. Some say the tradition began in Nuremberg, known as the "bee-garden of the Holy Roman Empire", famous for its beautiful honeys. Honey cakes spread from there to the rest of Europe. Spices might be added to enhance the honey: saffron, perhaps, for richness and colour, and pepper, cinnamon and ginger for heat. But spices were not what made these dense, dry cakes so special. It was only in the 17th century that British gingerbread started to be made with treacle instead of honey and changed into something else, something lighter, softer and altogether gingery-er.
You can still experience the older kind of gingerbread, though, in the Lebkuchen of Germany and the pains d'epices of France. The best pain d'epices is made by mixing strong-tasting honey such as buckwheat or heather with rye flour and leaving it to mature for a month, before it is combined with leavening and spices and baked. The finer the honey, the better the cake. Should you find yourself in Paris, visit the Maison du Miel, in the rue Vignon, near the Madeleine. This is a shop so perfect, it seems you must have dreamt it. The same bee-motif tiles have been on the floor since the place first opened 104 years ago. The intelligent, soignee women who run the Maison sell every kind of honey imaginable, as well as candles and medicines made from propolis and pollen. If you go there now, when the streets of Paris are at their frosty best, you will also find sweet, chewy shapes of pain d'epices, decorated with happy paper pictures of Saint Nicolas, or long slabs of cake for grown-ups, with glazed edges and lingering honey flavour.
In the Netherlands, Sinterklaas, or Father Christmas, would be nothing without his aniseedy honey cake (taai taai) and spice biscuits (pepernoten), which get thrown out of jute sacks to waiting children by his very politically incorrect, blacked-up helper, Zwarte Piet, or Black Peter. (This dubious figure is a jet-dark ignoramus, a devil rescued from hell who servilely helps the saint deliver presents and makes elves look dignified by comparison.) Dutch children also buy Sinterklaas-shaped spice biscuits called speculaas, rather like our gingerbread men except that they are flavoured with cardamom, mace, aniseed and cloves, as well as ginger.
Back in Britain, if we want good gingerbread, we will probably have to bake it ourselves. This is no hardship. It is only a question of melting butter with treacle or honey and sugar and mixing with eggs, flour and spice, before baking until your house smells more cosy than any room fragrance could make it. There are plenty of good recipes for gingerbread, but I can recommend Nigella Lawson's from How to Eat, which is pleasingly damp and keeps well, wrapped in foil. Whatever recipe you choose, your gingerbread will be substantial, satisfying and the result of quiet, creative endeavour - everything that a Starbucks gingerbread latte is not.
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
