Sour Milk (Sandy)

Dear Sandy,

° I reckon you already know how to clabber milk. No, I don't refer to your famous childhood singing voice, but to your mother's home economics lore.

° I shall remind you just the same.

° Place into a measuring cup:

1.33 Tablespoons (white, so as not to discolour the batter) vinegar

or

1.5 T lemon juice

or

.25 Cup (4 T) grapefruit juice

or

.75 Cup (12 T) orange juice,

then fill the cup with as much sweet milk as needed to produce the quantity of sour milk required for the recipe. Mix well.--Successful Baking for Flavor and Texture, 1936, Arm & Hammer, Cow Brand.

° Or else, next time your refrigerator begins to run constantly and, notwithstanding, the ice and frozen foods thaw, hope for the best for three or four days, then eccolo! real homemade natural sour milk.

§

° Of course the reason you will want to sour some milk is to bake my greatgrandmother Mammie H-----'s Sour Milk Gingerbread, which you have decided to feature at the b & b.

° Here is the 1890's recipe:

Combine

.25 Cup Larkin Cooking Oil

1 heaping Cup sugar

1 egg.

Beat very light, add

.5 Cup molasses.

Sift together

1.75 Cups flour

2 teaspoons ginger

1 teaspoon cinnamon

.5 teaspoon salt

.5 teaspoon soda.

Add dry ingredients to egg mixture alternately with

.5 Cup sour milk.

Mix, turn into oiled and floured pan, bake 40 minutes at 350°.

° Delicious.

§

° Delicious.

° Yet Aunt O--- updated and enriched the recipe about 1950. (For you can google Larkin Cooking Oil all you want and never come up with so much as a cracked collector's bottle, the rancid contents all leaked out.)

Combine

.5 Cup (Mazola) corn oil

1 heaping Cup white sugar

2 freerange eggs.

Beat very light, add

.5 Cup molasses.

Sift together

2 Cups plain flour

2 "kind of" heaped teaspoons ground ginger

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

.5 teaspoon salt

.5 level teaspoon soda.

Add dry ingredients to egg mixture alternately with

.5 Big Cup buttermilk.

Mix, then pour into oiled and floured pan. Bake at 350° for up to 40 minutes, depending on oven.

"It is very delicious, better kept 2 or 3 days--but good fresh." So said Aunt O---.

§

° Very delicious.

° No doubt.

° Dunno.

° For I butter and flour the 9x13 pan (remember to roll the rather liquid batter up the sides, for the bread rises right smart), and I "kind of" heap the cinnamon too. And I use low cholesterol eggs from vegetarian chickens, poor little fowl, never to know the joy of chasing a grasshopper across the front yard and pecking it, the hopper, into crackly crispy little bits.

° Nor does my 350° oven take more than 30 to 35 minutes to bake.

° I do use regulation measuring cup and spoons, a practise to which neither Aunt O--- nor my mother ever stooped.

§

° So, plus butterfat on the pan, minus butterfat because the sourmilk used to be whole milk, plus cholesterol because of the second egg, minus cholesterol because of the vegan chickens . . . .

° So what, 'cause I top the whole thing, while still warm from the oven, with the following buttermilk icing:

Melt

1 stick butter.

Add

1 Cup sugar

.5 Cup buttermilk

.5 teaspoon soda

1 Tablespoon honey (or corn syrup or molasses)

.5 teaspoon vanilla

.25 Cup shaved crystallised ginger root (optional, to taste).

Bring to a hard boil. When you feel like it's ready (when it has begun to brown and to smell irresistible), remove from heat, beat till foam disappears, pour over gingerbread.

This gingerbread will keep, covered, under refrigeration, for a good two weeks without appreciable staleness.

° Very delicious, I tried it on Nathan.

§

° Very delicious.

° Although, as you remark, it turns out differently each time one makes it. Longer baking yields a dry bread that contrasts better with the topping. Shorter baking seems to emphasise the ginger. Overboiling the topping, past the moment of greatest fragrance, makes a chewier topping (a plus) with less butterscotch flavour (a minus). Honey makes a contrast, molasses a complement. Corn syrup adds yet more vanilla.

° Nathan agrees with you, he'd like even more ginger flavour. Just heap it to heart's content, says I.

° Or buy a fresh bottle.

° Nudge it this way or that, suit yourself.

§§§§§

° Look at the parsimony of the ingredients in the 1890 version. One egg. Sourmilk used not as trendy frippery, but because springrefrigerated milk was forever souring back then. And the ginger helped conceal whatever skankiness the baking soda was unable to neutralise.

° Look at the prosperity of 1950. Two huge brownshelled eggs. More oil, more flour, more ginger, more more more. And buttermilk, marketed on purpose, could be bought at the grocery store. Sorghum (real) molasses was still boiled down locally, so Aunt O--- had no need to rejigger the recipe for storeboughten dark brown sugar.

° Look at the effeminate and pansyassed--o wait, that's our generation. Too lazy to rewarm the gingerbread in the oven and serve with melted butter, too cowardly to heap cold gingerbread with heartclogging freshly whipped cream (and I'm the last human in the western world who still uses a Julia Child whip, no electricity for me! And that aerosol junk, like Burma Shave!). So my added topping prebutters the gingerbread, cholesterol out of sight, cholesterol out of mind.

° Mammie H----- and Aunt O--- are just guffawing in their graves.

° Confectionately, Giac.