Source: Wikipedia
I saw a kit for a gingerbread house in the store. It reminded me that I still don’t understand the point of gingerbread houses. When I was a kid I’d see them in stores, maybe in displays at the mall, and sometimes at school. Sometimes classmates made them and brought them in to show off. All that left me wondering, hey, when do we get to eat the gingerbread house? If anyone did I wasn’t around to get a piece. And I wanted a piece. I loved, and still love, gingerbread, and also ginger ale, ginger beer, ginger snaps. When it came to Gilligan’s Island I wanted to hang out with the Professor, but that’s another story. A friend of my parents who loved to throw dinner parties made homemade gingerbread, and it’s still the best I ever had. It was thick and soft, more like cake than bread, and she’d lightly drizzle it with a lemon sauce. Such intense flavors shouldn’t work together but they did; the lemon heightened the spiciness of the ginger.
Now that we’ve got a whole series that asks the question Is It Cake? a gingerbread house might seem, at best, retro—and maybe that’s part of the appeal. There’s a nostalgia factor. The history of gingerbread in Europe goes back over a thousand years; in the Middle East and beyond it goes back even further since it was brought to Europe by returning Crusaders. In the 17th century guilds controlled the production of gingerbread for most of the year, but at Christmas and Easter anyone could bake it—anyone who could afford it, anyway. Ginger was a very expensive import then, though by the 19th century it was easier to get. Charles Baudelaire sent gingerbread as a gift to friends, and recommended “English gingerbread, very thick, very black, so close that it has neither holes nor pores…”
And I also found this from The Country of Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett:
[T]he most renowned essay in cookery on the tables was a model of the old Bowden house made of durable gingerbread, with all the windows and doors in the right places, and sprigs of genuine lilac set at the front. It must have been baked in sections, in one of the last of the great brick ovens, and fastened together on the morning of the day. There was a general sigh when this fell into ruin at the feast’s end, and it was shared by a great part of the assembly, not without seriousness, and as if it were a pledge and token of loyalty. I met the maker of the gingerbread house, which had called up lively remembrances of a childish story. She had the gleaming eye of an enthusiast and a look of high ideals.
“I could just as well have made it all of frosted cake,” she said, “but ‘twouldn’t have been the right shade; the old house, as you observe, was never painted, and I concluded that plain gingerbread would represent it best. It wasn’t all I expected it would be,” she said sadly, as many an artist had said before her of his work.
It sounds wonderful but she still doesn’t answer the question, did they eat the gingerbread house?
Thanks for a very illuminating, delicious, and comforting post, my friend.
Ann Koplow recently posted…Day 4352: Comfort
Shortly after posting this I was talking to a friend who said she’d made some gingerbread houses but, like me, really didn’t see the point. She said by the time she was allowed to break them down and eat them the gingerbread had gotten stale. Anyway I’m glad this didn’t give you indigestion.