November 30, 2020 • 42 mins
Why do we shape gingerbread cookies into people and houses? Why is it generally considered a winter treat? In this classic episode, Anney and Lauren tackle gingerbread (in all its formats) head first.
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
Hello, and welcome to favor Prediction of I Heart Radio.
I'm Annie Reese and I'm Lauren Vocal Bam, and today
we've got a classic episode for you about gingerbread. Yes,
as promised in our recent episode on ginger indeed, Uh yeah,
we we went ahead and listened to it and we're like, oh, yeah,
this doesn't suck. We can we can reread. There's a
(00:30):
lot of talk about like gingerbread horror movies and you know,
so it's a far flowing episode for many reasons that
many episodes of ours are are like that to be Yeah, yeah, yeah,
And this one actually came out in in the summer
(00:52):
when we originally did it right, right, Yeah, August of
eighteen was the original air date for this one. Um,
because as we mentioned in the episode, Annie, you just
really had a bug about what gingerbread like buildings, like
what gingerbread architecture is all about. I'm still you know,
(01:13):
I understand my past self. I can see why she
wanted to know. And it's one of my favorite things.
Like after that, listeners sent as all of these amazing
these just feats of gingerbread architecture, and it blows my mind.
It's it's mind blowing. Um and uh a, okay, So
(01:35):
so if anyone hears any kind of construction noise in
the background, that's because construction is happening outside my window
right now. I can't really, I can't really stop it.
I mean I guess I could if I really tried
to use my powers for good. Um yeah yeah, so um,
so apologies if that is bothering anyone. Hopefully it doesn't
(01:56):
come through that hard. But uh. Secondly, in on the
topic of gingerbread, yes, um, right right now as this
is about to air. Um, all of the like recent
news headlines about gingerbread are related to upcoming holiday season
gingerbread construction contests. And I am so excited to read
(02:20):
Google in like a month and like see the results
of all of this. Yes, me too. I want to
go down like a nerdy of course I do nerdy gingerbread,
like if someone tried like the Death Star something I
need to know. I need to know. Yeah. And speaking
of right, yeah, because you were gifted a nerd themed
(02:44):
gingerbread kit last year, right, yes, from super producer Dylan Fagin,
who knows me so well. He gave me a Marvel
Avenger's new York City Battle gingerbread kit, and as I've
mentioned previously, like a while back, I was going to
(03:09):
use it in our Dungeons and Dragons campaign that Lauren
and I have been in for many many years. It
is many many years, And I was going to build
a Dungeons and Dragons diorama with this Marvel Avengers gingerbread kit,
which is exactly as nerdy as it sounds. And I
did it. Listeners, it happened. Lauren was a witness. Yeah, no,
(03:32):
she she did, y'all. It was the the cookies were decorated, um,
it was, it was thematically appropriate. She involved lighting with this.
The diorama that was very fancy, thank you, and and
the and these gingerbread pieces lasted through like a couple
(03:53):
of years of this game. Yeah. So so what happened
was Dying gave to me and then I don't think
I got around to using it for a year. A
long time time is weird, but it was. It was
a decent amount of time. I think it was almost
a year because it was he gave it to me
in December of the previous year, and I don't think I,
(04:15):
like built it until maybe September. I think that's right. Um.
And then due to scheduling difficulties, I had it built
and you know, I'm so proud of it, and the
party gets there and I'm like, oh, behold, but then
the power went out on somebody's connection, so we had
(04:36):
to postpone, and like we didn't get to I didn't
get to use it again for three months. And I
was opening it, I'm like, there's gonna be all these
plugs in. Here's gonna be rotten. Nope, still smelled good,
perfect perfect condition. I don't know how I feel about that,
but that was the case. I did not eat it.
If anyone's like, oh my god, now that's probably that's
(04:56):
probably for the best. Although I mean, you know, if
you don't see mold growing on it, it's probably okay.
You know. It's probably the anti microbial properties of both
sugar and maybe ginger and some of those other spices
in there. That's just keeping it nice and preserved. Lauren,
always with the science, even in my very sim in
(05:18):
diorama made of ginger bread. Yeah, it smelt great, um.
And you know, just because I know some of you've
written in which we really appreciate about our D n
D a sides and uh we finished the campaign. We did,
or at least we finished my Yeah. Yeah, it's like
a year and a half it has Yeah, we only
(05:40):
managed to get together about once a month. Um because
uh yeah, our our other co workers who also have
kids are are our co players and so um so
scheduling everybody is difficult. But but yeah, yeah we we
we were victorious. We didn't we didn't term the entire party.
It was so great. I felt so much power, the
(06:04):
fear lived for it. I was only worried for a
few seconds. There was only a couple of times that
I was worried. She tells us afterwards that, like we
were perilously close to ay, like a random role that
would have just boned us forever, like just boned those
(06:26):
characters into unusability forever. So I'm glad that that didn't happen.
I'm really glad that that didn't happen. I was. You know,
there's a it's a weird place being a d M,
because there's a part of you that's like really wants
to win and wants you to lose. But then I'm
also your friend, and I don't want to ruin the games.
Almost I don't want them to. It's an interesting uh
(06:49):
intersection share share There's a balance. There's a balance there
for sure. And you know, you know, if I've been
I've been playing this uh, this tiefly Barbarian for like
three years now, and uh, if something had happened to her,
you know, I would be sad. I would be sad.
But um, but it would be okay. You know, Oh
(07:11):
you're you're a bigger woman than I. I think I'd
be devastated my character, but maybe that's just a difference
in personality as well. Um, but yeah, I'm sure we'll
pick it back up soon. And we actually have another
campaign running at the same the same time. But I
(07:33):
thought we'd give you an update on the old Gingerbread
Diarrama campaign. Oh yeah, for for anyone who was curious.
There there he also, I took all these videos of
of it, and I like after every session, and I'm
gonna string it together and it's gonna be really funny.
(07:54):
I think I always do what I think it's gonna happen,
and then I do a post like, well, of course
that did happened. Oh that's great, Yeah, you should post
that somewhere. That would be mortifying. I'm sure. Uh yeah,
I mean it's usually pretty funny. It's usually like, well,
stop mortifying for you, mortifying for like us the players.
(08:18):
I don't. I don't think so. I think it was very,
very funny. It was always like, well, I thought they
were going to go do this really important thing, but
they wanted to go shopping instead. Instead, they spent the
entire session talking to an owl. Yes, did happen? Okay, yeah,
you know that's the fun of it. You gotta roll
with it, literally, um, and you know what, you also
(08:42):
got to roll out gingerbread. Oh there you go. Good
tie back. All right, I guess without further ado, we
will get into this classic episode and let former Annie
and Lauren take it away. Hello, and welcome to food Stuff.
(09:07):
I'm an Aries and I'm Lauren voc Obam And today
it's Christmas in July, apparently because we're talking about gingerbread. Yes,
we could not wait for the holidays. It was impossible
to ask you you could not wait for the holidays.
And I was willing to come on this journey with you.
Well you sold me out right at the beginning, Lauren.
(09:29):
But that's ok, that's okay. You're not sorry. I really
want to get to the bottom of those dang houses.
I want to know why people do that, and we
will talk about that absolutely, and I have right at
the front. I feel like we could do this entire
episode about just my gingerbread memories because I've got a
(09:50):
lot of them. Yeah. Yeah, And one one of my
favorites is that every every Christmas, my family makes gingerbread. Okay, um,
we do make the pudding variety, which I've learned is
not technically ginger with some people like to fight with
me over whether or not that's really ginger. What's the
pudding variety? You like? Put butter scotch putting in there.
(10:11):
They're much softer and less like spicier. I prefer them.
But yeah, you know, people like to fight about those things. Um,
so you make them every Christmas. And one Christmas when
I was fourteen, I had my best friend over and
we made the gingerbread. And it's kind of a big ordeal,
Like we frost them, we sprinkled the whole thing, the
(10:34):
whole thing. It takes eight minutes for them to cook.
So I remember this because I came downstairs hoping to
enjoy a wonderful warm plate of cookies and instead I
find a note taped to the oven and it says,
you can't catch me, I'm the gingerbread man. And it
(10:57):
was followed by a clue as to where his whereabouts.
Oh my goodness, this did he lead lead you on
a scavenger Huh? He did? There were fourteen clues, fourteen clues,
and my friend and I, fourteen years old, had to
go on the scavenger hunt and my mom, it was
(11:18):
my mom, surprise, surprise, it wasn't It wasn't actually the
gingerbread man. But I love actually thought to do this
for the first time as were like teenagers. But we
loved it so much that we kind of begrudgingly asked
her to do it again next year and it became
a tradition. Um. And another thing I love about our
(11:40):
gingerbread tradition is my younger brother used to make what
he would call a broken home. He would make like
your traditional because we had a woman and a daughter
and a son. He would just make a bunch of
them and then he's like, rip their arms off and
stick them on their heads or whatever, and then he
put a heart in the middle and he'd break it
and asked goodness. And when I asked him why he
(12:02):
did this, he said, we're gonna bite their heads off. Anyway,
he revealed to me that that messed him up for
a while as a kid, because he was younger when
the gingerbread man right away at our house and when
he thought, well, if it's an animate, living being and
we're just eating it, it really wow, it really did
a game number on Well. I hope he's recovered. I
(12:25):
think so I do have some funny pictures I should
perhaps post of the broken home. That does sound pretty great.
It's very creative. I've got to say. Um, yeah, so
I have a lot of experience with gingerbread in my lifetime. Yeah,
I I do not have such a strong gingerbread family tradition.
(12:46):
Are are cookie decorating is usually with sugar cookies in
my home. So that's my dad's preferred He would very
much prefer if we did that as opposed to gingerbread.
But outvoted. Yeah, yeah, I you know I like cookies.
I can't really Oh my gosh, me too. My cookie
dessert chart, well, my dessert chart cookies out the top.
(13:09):
Cookies and pie and doughnuts are number those are the
top three. Anyway, Um, this will probably be a future
food fairy tale. Yeah, totally, Yeah, we should. I would
love to do a good dramatic reading of a gingerbread
man story. It There are, as it turns out, all
long history of those things, and I'll get into that
in a little while. But yes, in the meanwhile, gingerbread
(13:34):
what is it? Great question because originally, like medieval Europe,
originally gingerbread simply meant preserved ginger. It didn't shift to
encompass the desserts we think of nowadays until the fifteenth century,
and that nowadays definition is pretty loose. A combination of
ginger and a sweetener like sugar, treacle, molasses and we're honey. Yeah.
(13:57):
A variety of baked goods are called ginger bread, from
cakes ranging from dense to delicate, and cookies ranging from soft,
too chewy to crunchy. Ginger and a non white form
of sugar are the most important ingredients of brown sugar, molasses,
and etcetera helped give ginger bread it's it's distinctive kind
of roasty color, but it's also frequently seasoned with other warm,
(14:18):
wintry spices like cinnamon, clove, and nutmeg, and of course
because it's baked good, butter and flour are usually involved
or some sim lacrum thereof. In many traditions, the cookies
are shaped and decorated with candies and white icing or glaze,
or maybe covered with chocolate or filled with sweet stuff
like marzipan. That reminds me one of my first memories
(14:40):
is making gingerbread house. Yeah, yeah, I had a big party,
um and we all made gingerbread houses. I think it's
my third birth Oh my goodness. Huh, yeah, that seems
like a a tall order for three year olds. It's
a lot of destroying of the gingerbread houses for sure,
and a lot of just sticking gum drops everywhere design.
(15:01):
Oh yeah, I think this house has already made and
we were just decorating them. Anyway, Lots of memories in
this old brain. And there's a lot of different types
of gingerbread around the world, as you could probably guess,
and building gingerbread houses is no joke. In parts of Germany, Russia,
Poland and the Czech Republic and France, there are gingerbread
(15:23):
regulations sanctioned by the government Circle of the Middle Ages.
There's a museum of gingerbread and torn Poland it's on
the site of a gingerbread factory that opened back in
five and ran for a whole century. In torn bakers
still guard their recipes like very carefully, but apparently they
involve aging the dough for up to a year, which
(15:46):
means that my very favorite thing is probably involved bacteria. Boop.
I wonder how many people said that with you. I
like to hope at least two a solid too, is
what I'm hoping. If you're curious as to why gingerbread
are such a fall winter treat, it might be because, um,
(16:09):
a lot of those spices present in gingerbread cookies or
gingerbread were believed to have warming abilities, and it kind
of makes you wonder about the warm feeling you get
from comfort food, or it did for me at least. Um.
These spices also were reminiscent of the gifts of the
Magi to Baby Jesus. And speaking of it's also possible
that since the cookies are meant to look like men,
(16:31):
but they kind of really more looked like babies, they
might have come to represent the Baby Jesus. Yeah. Yeah,
And of course, gingerbread is also a flavor now. Um,
you can find recipes online for gingerbread brownies and cookie
bars and trifles and cupcakes and cheesecakes and layer cakes
and popcorn and French toast, you name it. The gingerbread latte,
(16:53):
the gingerbread latte, Yes, I look. Gingerbread pancakes served with
lemon curd is one of the best things on the
whole planet. And diners that serve a year round are
the very best diners. You can fight me. I'm on
board and I want to go now. I've never had
that before, and I love gingerbreads here here in Atlanta,
Java jive does it. There's my My original gingerbread pancake
(17:17):
experience was in Austin, and I'm forgetting the name of
the place off the top of my head, but it
was clearly like a transcendental experience for me. Wow. Alright, well,
I'm adding that to the to do list. Gingerbread has
shown up in a lot of cultural things as well
a lot of media. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Um. Gingerbread
(17:40):
cookies were the couple in question in the Cookie Suit Trap.
The gingerbread people are the main characters in the game
Candy Land. Um. They also make up the Nutcracker's Army
and The Nutcracker gingerbread Men guest starred on The Muppet
Show operated by Frank oz Um and the Geni. Of course,
in the film series Struck and I seem to remember
(18:00):
some violent gingerbread men in Crampus. It sounds right, I believe.
So there's a whole scene where people are getting not killed,
but hurt very very badly by cookies. Um. There's the
Robert Altman film The gingerbread Man with Kenneth Brenna and
Robert Downey Jr. Which is a legal thriller despite the name. Um,
and I also saw a really bad horror movie called
(18:23):
The Ginger dead Man, where the ashes of a serial
killer were added into a gingerbread mix and then baked
into one murderous cookie. And the sequels are called Passion
of the Crust and Saturday Night Cleaver. M There's also
that Stephen King novela The Gingerbread Girl. It's true. Yeah. Um.
(18:48):
The Brothers Grim never included a gingerbread man type story
in their collections, but the two thousand five Terry Gilliam
film The Brothers Graham did feature this, like mud Monster
gingerbread Man, that sort of like possesses or rather like
absorbs a little boy. Yeah. Um. And there is of
course the fairy tale than the gingerbread Man, which we
(19:11):
will discuss a little bit more in death LYI there
and also aside one of my personal greatest fears, the
runners runs are runners diarrhea also goes by the gingerbread Man.
And going back to the novella by Stephen King, maybe
it's about a woman who runs too much, and it's called, yeah,
(19:32):
the Gingerbread Girls, So it could just be because like,
run can't catch me? If you can, it's pretty good
run run yeah, I see yeah, yeah, well I I
my mind was immediately like runners runs. My goodness, what
a nightmare it is. Stephen King. The nutritional qualities of
gingerbread perhaps obviously very vastly depending on the recipe that
(19:53):
you use, But you know, generally, y'all, it's a it's
a sweetened baked good, so it's a treat, not a
health food. Yeah. I only eat gingerbread the time we
make it, generally in a year, but I do eat
the entire plate of cookies. Oh yeah, yeah, I mean
it's like, well, I don't need to justify you do
not to myself perhaps, but not to you, um, if
(20:18):
we're talking about gingerbread numbers. Gingerbread is one of the
most popular winter holiday cookies in the US and in
much of Europe. In a New York chef by the
name of John Lovitch created a gingerbread village that covered
three hundred square feet that's about twenty eight square meters
and consisted of one point five tons of gingerbread structures,
including a hundred and thirty five residential buildings, twenty two
(20:40):
commercial buildings, cable cars, and an underground subway. We don't
even have cable cars. That sounds like bigger than some
small towns. It wasn't small so medium sized town. Yeah.
Traditions golf Club and Viyron, Texas currently holds the record
for largest ginger at house. How big was it to ask?
(21:03):
It was big enough to need a permit? What? Yeah,
forty cubic feet Like many houses that used bricks, only
these four thousand bricks were made of ginger and that
took one thousand, eight hundred pounds of butter and over
one thousand ounces of ground ginger. It was huge. There
is also a Guinness record for the largest gingerbread man.
(21:25):
It was created by an Ikea in Oslo, Norway, in
two thousand nine. He weighed six hundred and fifty one
kilos that's about one thousand, four hundred and thirty five pounds,
and was baked in a single piece. And y'all look,
look this one up. The photo on the Guinness website
is something that producer Dylan described as it's like a
(21:46):
group of scientists have this gingerbread man cryogenically frozen, and
some of them are like, don't wake it up. It's
a bad idea, and others are like, no, no, no,
it's gonna be totally fine. He said, And I agree
that he's never seen a group of people look so
serious about gingerbread, and he's never seen ginger dead man either. No.
I guess not. I guess not. Well, it's a cautionary tale.
(22:11):
I you know, who are we to play gods of Ginger?
I don't know, but they are kind of Apparently we're
not the only ones who think they're a little frightening,
because they did show up in a lot of horror. Yeah,
I was. I was scared by the brothers Graham, Terry
Gillian version. Oh yeah, that's frightening. I UM one last
(22:33):
gingerbread memory from me. I last, I think last Christmas. UM.
Two christmases ago, I went on a very long cruise
with my then boyfriend and UM. It was the second
largest cruise ship in the world, and it had a
gingerbread display that was so realistic looking. I didn't realize
(22:55):
it was gingerbread until I'd walked past it like several
days in our I thought it was like model houses.
Holy heck, it was gingerbread. Very impressive. That is impressive. Uh.
Speaking of memories and history, we have some more gingerbread
history for you that isn't just Annie's. But first we
(23:15):
have a quick break for a word from our sponsor,
and we're back. Thank you sponsored, Yes, thank you. Ginger
root has roots all the way back to ancient China,
(23:36):
where it was used medicinally. Oh and also the ancient Egyptians.
Men have used it in ceremonial practices. The ancient Romans
ate gingerbread, but what was more like honey cakes, probably
to rev up their libido, and possibly these gigs were
shaped like men with all the right anatomical bits. Ancient Romans, oh,
(23:57):
ancient Romans, Yes, the ancient Chinese weren't the only ones
that thought ginger had beneficial health properties. Henry the Eighth
snapped it up, and that's a ginger snaps pun for
one more horror movie reference in there um, and he
mixed it up with a couple of other things in
hopes of staving off the plague. Ginger is still used
(24:18):
for things like upset stomachs and nausea. I was given
some on a cruise ship once for seasickness. European sailors
working during the whaling and globalization colonization kind of eras
would buy hard gingerbread to take out with them on
long voyages for the purpose of settling their stomachs. Hold up, though,
the first recipe for gingerbread may have first appeared as
(24:40):
early as two thousand four b c E out of
ancient Greece, but this according to the book Making Gingerbread
Houses by Rhonda Massingham Heart. Ancient China followed suit with
their own recipe in tenth century c E. And then yes,
by the Middle Ages, Europe had their own take. And yes,
at first it was a rich person and food. Oh yeah,
(25:01):
I mean you know you needed the sugar to make
it sweet. You needed the spices which were expensive, Oh
so expensive. Um and this year p n rsp is
closing in on our modern version. It referred to a
hard cookie that may or may not have been predecked
in gold guilding, similar to the guilding on colonial American houses.
Um and that's sometimes referred to as gingerbread work. Um
(25:24):
and These cookies were possibly shaped like kings, queens and animals.
If you were to attend to fair in England, France,
Germany and Holland during this time, you were pretty much
guaranteed to run into one of these gingerbreads, so much
so that they became known as gingerbread fairs, and the
cookies themselves were sometimes called fairingx huh. By eighty we
(25:46):
have references to a Polish version of gingerbread cookies called nicki,
derived from the word pepper. A lot of Northern European
countries words for gingerbread tend to derive from pepper, including
maybe my favorite, the Norwegian pepper packer pepper, Isn't it
fun to say? It is? That's fun? Um? In Germany,
(26:07):
these cookies often had messages on them, similar to the
candy slash sweethearts. Um, you're super all I need is
you things like that. Nuremberg was known as the gingerbread
capital of the world in the sixteen hundreds, and that
city's museum houses the oldest known recorded gingerbread recipe. To
this day, Nuremberg's gingerbread has quote protected geographical indication from
(26:32):
the European Union, like Champagne does in France. Um, they
don't make men so much as horses and hearts these days,
though I read that some other European countries kind of
look at as a skew for still making them. Yeah,
Holy Roman Emperor Frederick the Third handed out cookies that
looked like him when he was campaigning, and seasons informed
(26:55):
the shape. You'd find flowers denoted spring, for instance, or
even arm ladies looking to grant their night of choice
luck during a tournament might present him with a cookie
or would eat a gingerbread husband to put out vibes
to the universe that you're looking to secure a real,
non cookie based man. But why though, if you could
(27:16):
have a cookie, I got a big I got a
big thing for cookies. These fancy gingerbread cookies came to
personify the English elite, and there were all kinds of
shape based superstitions, doctor fidelity, a pig for luck, a
baby for a child, a lion man for virility. There
(27:38):
was even a Swedish legend that it might grant wishes.
If you held a gingerbread and the palm of your
hand made a wish and then broke it with either
your thumb or index finger, and it broke into three pieces,
your wish would come true. Clearly, clearly, have to try
that next time. The idea of decorating cookies and shaping
(27:59):
them is largely due to Elizabeth the First who elevated
the gingerbread cookie game when she made cookies in the
shapes of dignitaries on her course. And these cookies were
made by whipping up a paste and pressing that that
paste into wooden molds. And at first this paste was
a mixture of bread crumbs, almond, meile, sugar, rosewater, and ginger.
In the sixteenth century, eggs came into the equation along
(28:21):
with other sweeteners. And you can find these molds and
museums today, and you'd find these cookies at weddings and wigs.
And it was possibly accepted as currency in some parts
of Europe for a short amount of time, and a
fun story suggests that Elizabeth First would only give a
cookie modeled after your likeness to you if you were worthy.
She deemed you worthy. If she found you coming up short,
(28:44):
she'd eat the cookie head first, probably within your view,
so you knew. I went to the trouble of having
this cookie made, and I'm eating it right in front
of you, head first. Yeah, all right, all Lizzie, Which
just about brings us to the ultimate question I want
to answer, what's the deal with those gingerbread houses? The
(29:09):
deal is sixteenth century Germans and their love of the
brother's grim story of Hansel and Gretel. A lot of
you are probably like, no, dub well, I wasn't. It's
sort of a chicken and egg type thing. Though. Did
the fairy tale lead to the creation of gingerbread houses?
Did gingerbread houses inspire the fairy tale, which in turn
(29:29):
popularized the gingerbread houses mysteries of history? No one knows anyho.
These early gingerbread houses were way nicer than when I'm
used to Not only did they add that gold guilding,
but they also had gold foil wall papering. Fancy related
(29:50):
gingerbread men were thought to be baked by witches, of course,
and then used as sort of voodoo dolls to cause
pain and perhaps death. Dead authorities made the baking and
eating of gingerbread men illegal in sixteen oh seven in
an attempt to quell witchcraft. That's some serious business. Well,
you know, you're you're you're doing what you can, and
(30:14):
that's making other shapes that gingerbread men. Shakespeare mentioned gingerbread
in a play in quote, and I had but one
pity in the world. Thou shouldst have it to buy gingerbread.
Oh and John Barrett claimed it had the power to
soothe your stomach. In the sixteenth century, as ginger became
(30:35):
more affordable, gingerbread finally ventured out of the aristocratic bubble,
And sometime after this it even kind of came to
mean the reverse. Gingerbread went from denoting fancy and elegant
to poor and maybe even a feminate. The harshest of
insults um take this quote from sixty seven's The Elder Brother.
(30:57):
He has an ass a piece of gingerbread guilt over
to please foolish girls and puppets. Uh yeah, yeah, kind
of kind of an insult based on like, oh, look
at how like overlay fancy you are, look at what
a pretender. Yeah, gingerbread cookies arrived to the New World
with the columnist in Virginia, candidates might offer a cookie
(31:18):
in an attempt to win your vote. Our old pal.
Author of American cookery, Amelia Simmons her that book came
with three different recipes for gingerbread, including this one for
soft gingerbread. So it's the second recipe. Rubs three pounds
of sugar, two pounds of butter into four pounds of flour,
Add twenty eggs, four ounces of ginger, four spoons rose water,
(31:41):
and then bake as the previous recipe number one. And
this soft kind was America's preferred kind. When Marquis de
Lafayette visited the home of George Washington's mother Mary, she
made soft gingerbread for him. Um she made them in
both the shapes of eagles and kinks. Americans took the
idea of the gingerbread house and ran with it too.
(32:03):
It caught on on a more widespread level in America
than it did in Britain. And speaking of running with it,
The Gingerbread Boy was first published in eighteen seventy five,
and as it turns out there is a long tradition
in folklore of telling stories about runaway baked goods. What
there's okay. There's an in depth classification system for folklore,
(32:27):
and the gingerbread boy or gingerbread man, as we more
modernly know it, it's part of the Arena Thompson Uther type,
otherwise known as the runaway or fleeing pancake story, pancakes
gonna run away. There are all kinds of stories throughout
Europe about cakes or cookies or pancakes running off and
(32:47):
then mocking various animals and people about not being able
to catch and eat them. The the gingerbread man is
just the American version. Well, it makes more sense because
he has legs. How is it? Is it like rolling away?
You know? If I see a pancake just like rolling
I'm going to know it's the apocalypse. As by the
(33:10):
baked goods are here. They're here, and they're mocking us. Yes.
But but the first printing of the gingerbread Boy, which
probably followed a long oral tradition, was in this children's
literary journal called St. Nicholas Magazine, and the unnamed author
wrote about it. The gingerbread Boy is not strictly original.
A servant girl from Maine told it to my children.
(33:31):
It interested them so much that I thought it was
worth preserving. I asked where she found it, and she
said that an old lady told it to her in
her childhood. But this printing was more of a story
than like the kind of sing songy rhyme thing that
we know today. I think the first printed version that's
close to our our modern gingerbread man rhyme was in
(33:52):
in the Ladies Home Journal, written by one Ella M. White.
You know the whole like like run run fast as
you can, you can't catch me, a little ginger red
man sort of thing. Yeah. By the time parent w
cousins published a child book of stories in nineteen eleven,
the wording that we're more familiar with today you can't
catch me, I'm the gingerbread man, was cemented, and that
(34:15):
gingerbread recipe of Mary Ball Washington's um would wind up
getting passed down to her daughter Betty, who served it
at her own home, the ken Moore Plantation in Virginia,
and that recipe would eventually wind up saving that historical site.
Though long forgotten, it was found in the homes attic
in nine two by members of the Ken Moore Association
and the Daughters of the American Revolution who needed like
(34:38):
thirty grand to fund necessary repairs to the estate, so
they typed up the recipe. They sold copies of it
to visitors for ten cents. Apiece eventually sold the rights
to it to a company that created a like gingerbread
mix for purchasing supermarkets, who also provided it at a
discount back to chapters of the Daughters of the American Revolution,
who sold it to benefit the ken More to Gerbread Cookies,
(35:01):
saving historical saving history. Yeah, and I wanted to like
sort of wrap up. We've got a little bit of
gingerbread science, but I wanted to sort of wrap up
with um. There's this great interview that author and Burn,
author of the book American Cake, did with The Philly Voice,
and she said this about gingerbread. As years passed, the
(35:24):
recipes like gingerbread that passed down through generations were always
baked for holidays, mostly Christmas. There's a wonderful phrase I
found while researching American Cake and it goes something like this,
The holidays preserve what every day loses in short, if
it weren't for holiday baking, we wouldn't be hanging onto
old recipes like gingerbread. I like to think of gingerbread
(35:44):
is the quintessential American cake. It's a revolutionary cake, and
that our early American settlers adapted old European methods of
baking gingerbread to new ingredients and ovens. It came to
represent this new land where people of all backgrounds could
find refuge. Every gingerbread recipe baked in homes to day
can speak about the people who first made it. And
then there's the aroma in your kitchen of gingerbread being baked.
(36:06):
It just makes you smile. One whiff and you know
the holidays are here. Yeah, that's lovely. I hadn't really
thought about that, about how there's so much tradition into
the behind the foods we eat around the holidays, And really,
if that tradition wasn't there, how many of those foods
would we still me eating. Yeah, like a lot of
(36:27):
modern holiday foods can be traced really directly to like
Victorian era, which borrowed them from a lot of other
other places. And so yeah, it's fascinating it is. Meanwhile,
in the winter of the Oregon Museum of Science and
Industry had an exhibit celebrating the engineering side of gingerbread construction,
(36:51):
and every year Discovery Cube, which is a couple of
science museums in California, hosts signs of gingerbread competitions to
create impressive of gingerbread structures, and they also have a
gingerbread car derby. Like a little gingerbread you build a
little gingerbread cars, And there's a derby. I am baking
a gingerbread car this year. Oh within that gingerbread cook
(37:13):
he's going to get away, so fast get away? Oh no,
all right, Well I'm pretty good, pretty confident. You're also
pretty fast. You do a lot of running, Annie. I
think I've been training for this my whole life. I
just didn't know. Um. And I do have a few
(37:36):
a little bit of that, like gingerbread construction science for you,
some helpful hints for you to remember the next time
you're baking. Um. But first we've got one more quick
break for a word from our sponsor, and we're back.
(37:58):
Thank you sponsor. Yes cue. So, if you're looking to
construct your own gingerbread house or estate or palace or
getaway car, the internet does have some helpful hints for you.
I found an article in Popular Science called how to
Build a structurally sound Gingerbread House that was particularly useful. Um, first,
you're going to need to pick a gingerbread recipe that
(38:20):
does not use leavening agents, no eggs or baking powder
or what have you. And you're gonna need a blueprint
so that you'll know how much you need to bake
once you've got your dough rolled out, because you don't
want to use leveting agents because that will make it
puffy and therefore less sturdy. Right, my cookie recipe would
not work. No, No, you're you're gonna need to change
it up. Okay, okay, I can do that, all right.
(38:43):
And then once you have your dough rolled out, you're
gonna want to use a sharp knife to cut the
shapes of the individual pieces out of the dough prior
to baking. But don't remove the extra along the edges,
because that way you'll reduce spreading of the edges of
your shapes. Yeah, yeah, you don't. You don't want them
to thin out, no bad times. You can cut away
(39:05):
the excess after baking. Once everything's baked and cut out,
you're gonna need durable construction material, and that means proteins.
Royal icing made with egg whites, powdered sugar, and really
minimal other liquids will hold up pretty well as well.
Melted marshmallows, caramels, or gummies. Melted white chocolate can also
work well and has the advantage of firming up more
(39:26):
quickly than some of those other things. Support structures inside
the building will help distribute the weight of the walls
and the roof more evenly. And finally, Popular Science recommends
destroying your structure. I mean, you know, when you're ready, uh,
purposefully to see where the weak points are and thus
to build a better plan for next year. This is beautiful.
This sounds like a great project two for children to
(39:50):
undertake and to learn from. Right and if you want
even more specific advice and understand math a little bit
better than I do. U c L, a science and
food blog, made a really thorough post about the physics
involved called engineering the perfect gingerbread house. That's fantastic. Check
it out. I want to make one right now, and
(40:12):
there's nothing stopping you technically. I actually thought about making
cookies for this um, but we kind of randomly I
didn't think I was ever going to get to do
this in the middle of summer. Um, but I'm so excited.
I would just want to build things out of gingerbread. Yeah,
(40:34):
and think about physics, take pictures and like draw arrows.
Oh yeah, this is where the structure. Check out discovery
cubes um signs of Gingerbread competition that some of the
photos from are really gorgeous and incredibly impressive, Like they
have they have an adult and child categories, and like
(40:55):
kids as young as like five making these structures that
I don't think I could have built. So I'm like, well,
I'm okay. We should have a competition in the office.
Some people I think would be really good. Oh man,
some people would be embarrassingly good. Heck, they're gonna put
me to shame, Annie. But we get to eat it
after we do. That's true. That's all that matters in
(41:18):
the end, isn't it. It is okay, And that brings
us to the end of this classic episode on Gingerbread.
We hope that you enjoyed it, and we hope that
you're having a safe and happy holiday. Oh please, if
(41:41):
you're if you're making something or making your own traditions,
your new traditions. A virtual recipe swap would be cool. Yeah,
just yeah, let us know. Send all of those things
our way. We always love hearing from you. Our email
is hello at savorpod dot com. We are also on
social media. You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and
(42:02):
Instagram at savor pod, and we do hope to hear
from you. Savor is a production of I Heart Radio.
For more podcasts my heart Radio, you can go to
the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows. Thanks as always to our
super producers Dylan Fagin and Andrew Howard. Thanks to you
for listening, and we hope that lots more good things
are coming your way.
Hello, and welcome to favor Prediction of I Heart Radio.
I'm Annie Reese and I'm Lauren Vocal Bam, and today
we've got a classic episode for you about gingerbread. Yes,
as promised in our recent episode on ginger indeed, Uh yeah,
we we went ahead and listened to it and we're like, oh, yeah,
this doesn't suck. We can we can reread. There's a
(00:30):
lot of talk about like gingerbread horror movies and you know,
so it's a far flowing episode for many reasons that
many episodes of ours are are like that to be Yeah, yeah, yeah,
And this one actually came out in in the summer
(00:52):
when we originally did it right, right, Yeah, August of
eighteen was the original air date for this one. Um,
because as we mentioned in the episode, Annie, you just
really had a bug about what gingerbread like buildings, like
what gingerbread architecture is all about. I'm still you know,
(01:13):
I understand my past self. I can see why she
wanted to know. And it's one of my favorite things.
Like after that, listeners sent as all of these amazing
these just feats of gingerbread architecture, and it blows my mind.
It's it's mind blowing. Um and uh a, okay, So
(01:35):
so if anyone hears any kind of construction noise in
the background, that's because construction is happening outside my window
right now. I can't really, I can't really stop it.
I mean I guess I could if I really tried
to use my powers for good. Um yeah yeah, so um,
so apologies if that is bothering anyone. Hopefully it doesn't
(01:56):
come through that hard. But uh. Secondly, in on the
topic of gingerbread, yes, um, right right now as this
is about to air. Um, all of the like recent
news headlines about gingerbread are related to upcoming holiday season
gingerbread construction contests. And I am so excited to read
(02:20):
Google in like a month and like see the results
of all of this. Yes, me too. I want to
go down like a nerdy of course I do nerdy gingerbread,
like if someone tried like the Death Star something I
need to know. I need to know. Yeah. And speaking
of right, yeah, because you were gifted a nerd themed
(02:44):
gingerbread kit last year, right, yes, from super producer Dylan Fagin,
who knows me so well. He gave me a Marvel
Avenger's new York City Battle gingerbread kit, and as I've
mentioned previously, like a while back, I was going to
(03:09):
use it in our Dungeons and Dragons campaign that Lauren
and I have been in for many many years. It
is many many years, And I was going to build
a Dungeons and Dragons diorama with this Marvel Avengers gingerbread kit,
which is exactly as nerdy as it sounds. And I
did it. Listeners, it happened. Lauren was a witness. Yeah, no,
(03:32):
she she did, y'all. It was the the cookies were decorated, um,
it was, it was thematically appropriate. She involved lighting with this.
The diorama that was very fancy, thank you, and and
the and these gingerbread pieces lasted through like a couple
(03:53):
of years of this game. Yeah. So so what happened
was Dying gave to me and then I don't think
I got around to using it for a year. A
long time time is weird, but it was. It was
a decent amount of time. I think it was almost
a year because it was he gave it to me
in December of the previous year, and I don't think I,
(04:15):
like built it until maybe September. I think that's right. Um.
And then due to scheduling difficulties, I had it built
and you know, I'm so proud of it, and the
party gets there and I'm like, oh, behold, but then
the power went out on somebody's connection, so we had
(04:36):
to postpone, and like we didn't get to I didn't
get to use it again for three months. And I
was opening it, I'm like, there's gonna be all these
plugs in. Here's gonna be rotten. Nope, still smelled good,
perfect perfect condition. I don't know how I feel about that,
but that was the case. I did not eat it.
If anyone's like, oh my god, now that's probably that's
(04:56):
probably for the best. Although I mean, you know, if
you don't see mold growing on it, it's probably okay.
You know. It's probably the anti microbial properties of both
sugar and maybe ginger and some of those other spices
in there. That's just keeping it nice and preserved. Lauren,
always with the science, even in my very sim in
(05:18):
diorama made of ginger bread. Yeah, it smelt great, um.
And you know, just because I know some of you've
written in which we really appreciate about our D n
D a sides and uh we finished the campaign. We did,
or at least we finished my Yeah. Yeah, it's like
a year and a half it has Yeah, we only
(05:40):
managed to get together about once a month. Um because
uh yeah, our our other co workers who also have
kids are are our co players and so um so
scheduling everybody is difficult. But but yeah, yeah we we
we were victorious. We didn't we didn't term the entire party.
It was so great. I felt so much power, the
(06:04):
fear lived for it. I was only worried for a
few seconds. There was only a couple of times that
I was worried. She tells us afterwards that, like we
were perilously close to ay, like a random role that
would have just boned us forever, like just boned those
(06:26):
characters into unusability forever. So I'm glad that that didn't happen.
I'm really glad that that didn't happen. I was. You know,
there's a it's a weird place being a d M,
because there's a part of you that's like really wants
to win and wants you to lose. But then I'm
also your friend, and I don't want to ruin the games.
Almost I don't want them to. It's an interesting uh
(06:49):
intersection share share There's a balance. There's a balance there
for sure. And you know, you know, if I've been
I've been playing this uh, this tiefly Barbarian for like
three years now, and uh, if something had happened to her,
you know, I would be sad. I would be sad.
But um, but it would be okay. You know, Oh
(07:11):
you're you're a bigger woman than I. I think I'd
be devastated my character, but maybe that's just a difference
in personality as well. Um, but yeah, I'm sure we'll
pick it back up soon. And we actually have another
campaign running at the same the same time. But I
(07:33):
thought we'd give you an update on the old Gingerbread
Diarrama campaign. Oh yeah, for for anyone who was curious.
There there he also, I took all these videos of
of it, and I like after every session, and I'm
gonna string it together and it's gonna be really funny.
(07:54):
I think I always do what I think it's gonna happen,
and then I do a post like, well, of course
that did happened. Oh that's great, Yeah, you should post
that somewhere. That would be mortifying. I'm sure. Uh yeah,
I mean it's usually pretty funny. It's usually like, well,
stop mortifying for you, mortifying for like us the players.
(08:18):
I don't. I don't think so. I think it was very,
very funny. It was always like, well, I thought they
were going to go do this really important thing, but
they wanted to go shopping instead. Instead, they spent the
entire session talking to an owl. Yes, did happen? Okay, yeah,
you know that's the fun of it. You gotta roll
with it, literally, um, and you know what, you also
(08:42):
got to roll out gingerbread. Oh there you go. Good
tie back. All right, I guess without further ado, we
will get into this classic episode and let former Annie
and Lauren take it away. Hello, and welcome to food Stuff.
(09:07):
I'm an Aries and I'm Lauren voc Obam And today
it's Christmas in July, apparently because we're talking about gingerbread. Yes,
we could not wait for the holidays. It was impossible
to ask you you could not wait for the holidays.
And I was willing to come on this journey with you.
Well you sold me out right at the beginning, Lauren.
(09:29):
But that's ok, that's okay. You're not sorry. I really
want to get to the bottom of those dang houses.
I want to know why people do that, and we
will talk about that absolutely, and I have right at
the front. I feel like we could do this entire
episode about just my gingerbread memories because I've got a
(09:50):
lot of them. Yeah. Yeah, And one one of my
favorites is that every every Christmas, my family makes gingerbread. Okay, um,
we do make the pudding variety, which I've learned is
not technically ginger with some people like to fight with
me over whether or not that's really ginger. What's the
pudding variety? You like? Put butter scotch putting in there.
(10:11):
They're much softer and less like spicier. I prefer them.
But yeah, you know, people like to fight about those things. Um,
so you make them every Christmas. And one Christmas when
I was fourteen, I had my best friend over and
we made the gingerbread. And it's kind of a big ordeal,
Like we frost them, we sprinkled the whole thing, the
(10:34):
whole thing. It takes eight minutes for them to cook.
So I remember this because I came downstairs hoping to
enjoy a wonderful warm plate of cookies and instead I
find a note taped to the oven and it says,
you can't catch me, I'm the gingerbread man. And it
(10:57):
was followed by a clue as to where his whereabouts.
Oh my goodness, this did he lead lead you on
a scavenger Huh? He did? There were fourteen clues, fourteen clues,
and my friend and I, fourteen years old, had to
go on the scavenger hunt and my mom, it was
(11:18):
my mom, surprise, surprise, it wasn't It wasn't actually the
gingerbread man. But I love actually thought to do this
for the first time as were like teenagers. But we
loved it so much that we kind of begrudgingly asked
her to do it again next year and it became
a tradition. Um. And another thing I love about our
(11:40):
gingerbread tradition is my younger brother used to make what
he would call a broken home. He would make like
your traditional because we had a woman and a daughter
and a son. He would just make a bunch of
them and then he's like, rip their arms off and
stick them on their heads or whatever, and then he
put a heart in the middle and he'd break it
and asked goodness. And when I asked him why he
(12:02):
did this, he said, we're gonna bite their heads off. Anyway,
he revealed to me that that messed him up for
a while as a kid, because he was younger when
the gingerbread man right away at our house and when
he thought, well, if it's an animate, living being and
we're just eating it, it really wow, it really did
a game number on Well. I hope he's recovered. I
(12:25):
think so I do have some funny pictures I should
perhaps post of the broken home. That does sound pretty great.
It's very creative. I've got to say. Um, yeah, so
I have a lot of experience with gingerbread in my lifetime. Yeah,
I I do not have such a strong gingerbread family tradition.
(12:46):
Are are cookie decorating is usually with sugar cookies in
my home. So that's my dad's preferred He would very
much prefer if we did that as opposed to gingerbread.
But outvoted. Yeah, yeah, I you know I like cookies.
I can't really Oh my gosh, me too. My cookie
dessert chart, well, my dessert chart cookies out the top.
(13:09):
Cookies and pie and doughnuts are number those are the
top three. Anyway, Um, this will probably be a future
food fairy tale. Yeah, totally, Yeah, we should. I would
love to do a good dramatic reading of a gingerbread
man story. It There are, as it turns out, all
long history of those things, and I'll get into that
in a little while. But yes, in the meanwhile, gingerbread
(13:34):
what is it? Great question because originally, like medieval Europe,
originally gingerbread simply meant preserved ginger. It didn't shift to
encompass the desserts we think of nowadays until the fifteenth century,
and that nowadays definition is pretty loose. A combination of
ginger and a sweetener like sugar, treacle, molasses and we're honey. Yeah.
(13:57):
A variety of baked goods are called ginger bread, from
cakes ranging from dense to delicate, and cookies ranging from soft,
too chewy to crunchy. Ginger and a non white form
of sugar are the most important ingredients of brown sugar, molasses,
and etcetera helped give ginger bread it's it's distinctive kind
of roasty color, but it's also frequently seasoned with other warm,
(14:18):
wintry spices like cinnamon, clove, and nutmeg, and of course
because it's baked good, butter and flour are usually involved
or some sim lacrum thereof. In many traditions, the cookies
are shaped and decorated with candies and white icing or glaze,
or maybe covered with chocolate or filled with sweet stuff
like marzipan. That reminds me one of my first memories
(14:40):
is making gingerbread house. Yeah, yeah, I had a big party,
um and we all made gingerbread houses. I think it's
my third birth Oh my goodness. Huh, yeah, that seems
like a a tall order for three year olds. It's
a lot of destroying of the gingerbread houses for sure,
and a lot of just sticking gum drops everywhere design.
(15:01):
Oh yeah, I think this house has already made and
we were just decorating them. Anyway, Lots of memories in
this old brain. And there's a lot of different types
of gingerbread around the world, as you could probably guess,
and building gingerbread houses is no joke. In parts of Germany, Russia,
Poland and the Czech Republic and France, there are gingerbread
(15:23):
regulations sanctioned by the government Circle of the Middle Ages.
There's a museum of gingerbread and torn Poland it's on
the site of a gingerbread factory that opened back in
five and ran for a whole century. In torn bakers
still guard their recipes like very carefully, but apparently they
involve aging the dough for up to a year, which
(15:46):
means that my very favorite thing is probably involved bacteria. Boop.
I wonder how many people said that with you. I
like to hope at least two a solid too, is
what I'm hoping. If you're curious as to why gingerbread
are such a fall winter treat, it might be because, um,
(16:09):
a lot of those spices present in gingerbread cookies or
gingerbread were believed to have warming abilities, and it kind
of makes you wonder about the warm feeling you get
from comfort food, or it did for me at least. Um.
These spices also were reminiscent of the gifts of the
Magi to Baby Jesus. And speaking of it's also possible
that since the cookies are meant to look like men,
(16:31):
but they kind of really more looked like babies, they
might have come to represent the Baby Jesus. Yeah. Yeah,
And of course, gingerbread is also a flavor now. Um,
you can find recipes online for gingerbread brownies and cookie
bars and trifles and cupcakes and cheesecakes and layer cakes
and popcorn and French toast, you name it. The gingerbread latte,
(16:53):
the gingerbread latte, Yes, I look. Gingerbread pancakes served with
lemon curd is one of the best things on the
whole planet. And diners that serve a year round are
the very best diners. You can fight me. I'm on
board and I want to go now. I've never had
that before, and I love gingerbreads here here in Atlanta,
Java jive does it. There's my My original gingerbread pancake
(17:17):
experience was in Austin, and I'm forgetting the name of
the place off the top of my head, but it
was clearly like a transcendental experience for me. Wow. Alright, well,
I'm adding that to the to do list. Gingerbread has
shown up in a lot of cultural things as well
a lot of media. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Um. Gingerbread
(17:40):
cookies were the couple in question in the Cookie Suit Trap.
The gingerbread people are the main characters in the game
Candy Land. Um. They also make up the Nutcracker's Army
and The Nutcracker gingerbread Men guest starred on The Muppet
Show operated by Frank oz Um and the Geni. Of course,
in the film series Struck and I seem to remember
(18:00):
some violent gingerbread men in Crampus. It sounds right, I believe.
So there's a whole scene where people are getting not killed,
but hurt very very badly by cookies. Um. There's the
Robert Altman film The gingerbread Man with Kenneth Brenna and
Robert Downey Jr. Which is a legal thriller despite the name. Um,
and I also saw a really bad horror movie called
(18:23):
The Ginger dead Man, where the ashes of a serial
killer were added into a gingerbread mix and then baked
into one murderous cookie. And the sequels are called Passion
of the Crust and Saturday Night Cleaver. M There's also
that Stephen King novela The Gingerbread Girl. It's true. Yeah. Um.
(18:48):
The Brothers Grim never included a gingerbread man type story
in their collections, but the two thousand five Terry Gilliam
film The Brothers Graham did feature this, like mud Monster
gingerbread Man, that sort of like possesses or rather like
absorbs a little boy. Yeah. Um. And there is of
course the fairy tale than the gingerbread Man, which we
(19:11):
will discuss a little bit more in death LYI there
and also aside one of my personal greatest fears, the
runners runs are runners diarrhea also goes by the gingerbread Man.
And going back to the novella by Stephen King, maybe
it's about a woman who runs too much, and it's called, yeah,
(19:32):
the Gingerbread Girls, So it could just be because like,
run can't catch me? If you can, it's pretty good
run run yeah, I see yeah, yeah, well I I
my mind was immediately like runners runs. My goodness, what
a nightmare it is. Stephen King. The nutritional qualities of
gingerbread perhaps obviously very vastly depending on the recipe that
(19:53):
you use, But you know, generally, y'all, it's a it's
a sweetened baked good, so it's a treat, not a
health food. Yeah. I only eat gingerbread the time we
make it, generally in a year, but I do eat
the entire plate of cookies. Oh yeah, yeah, I mean
it's like, well, I don't need to justify you do
not to myself perhaps, but not to you, um, if
(20:18):
we're talking about gingerbread numbers. Gingerbread is one of the
most popular winter holiday cookies in the US and in
much of Europe. In a New York chef by the
name of John Lovitch created a gingerbread village that covered
three hundred square feet that's about twenty eight square meters
and consisted of one point five tons of gingerbread structures,
including a hundred and thirty five residential buildings, twenty two
(20:40):
commercial buildings, cable cars, and an underground subway. We don't
even have cable cars. That sounds like bigger than some
small towns. It wasn't small so medium sized town. Yeah.
Traditions golf Club and Viyron, Texas currently holds the record
for largest ginger at house. How big was it to ask?
(21:03):
It was big enough to need a permit? What? Yeah,
forty cubic feet Like many houses that used bricks, only
these four thousand bricks were made of ginger and that
took one thousand, eight hundred pounds of butter and over
one thousand ounces of ground ginger. It was huge. There
is also a Guinness record for the largest gingerbread man.
(21:25):
It was created by an Ikea in Oslo, Norway, in
two thousand nine. He weighed six hundred and fifty one
kilos that's about one thousand, four hundred and thirty five pounds,
and was baked in a single piece. And y'all look,
look this one up. The photo on the Guinness website
is something that producer Dylan described as it's like a
(21:46):
group of scientists have this gingerbread man cryogenically frozen, and
some of them are like, don't wake it up. It's
a bad idea, and others are like, no, no, no,
it's gonna be totally fine. He said, And I agree
that he's never seen a group of people look so
serious about gingerbread, and he's never seen ginger dead man either. No.
I guess not. I guess not. Well, it's a cautionary tale.
(22:11):
I you know, who are we to play gods of Ginger?
I don't know, but they are kind of Apparently we're
not the only ones who think they're a little frightening,
because they did show up in a lot of horror. Yeah,
I was. I was scared by the brothers Graham, Terry
Gillian version. Oh yeah, that's frightening. I UM one last
(22:33):
gingerbread memory from me. I last, I think last Christmas. UM.
Two christmases ago, I went on a very long cruise
with my then boyfriend and UM. It was the second
largest cruise ship in the world, and it had a
gingerbread display that was so realistic looking. I didn't realize
(22:55):
it was gingerbread until I'd walked past it like several
days in our I thought it was like model houses.
Holy heck, it was gingerbread. Very impressive. That is impressive. Uh.
Speaking of memories and history, we have some more gingerbread
history for you that isn't just Annie's. But first we
(23:15):
have a quick break for a word from our sponsor,
and we're back. Thank you sponsored, Yes, thank you. Ginger
root has roots all the way back to ancient China,
(23:36):
where it was used medicinally. Oh and also the ancient Egyptians.
Men have used it in ceremonial practices. The ancient Romans
ate gingerbread, but what was more like honey cakes, probably
to rev up their libido, and possibly these gigs were
shaped like men with all the right anatomical bits. Ancient Romans, oh,
(23:57):
ancient Romans, Yes, the ancient Chinese weren't the only ones
that thought ginger had beneficial health properties. Henry the Eighth
snapped it up, and that's a ginger snaps pun for
one more horror movie reference in there um, and he
mixed it up with a couple of other things in
hopes of staving off the plague. Ginger is still used
(24:18):
for things like upset stomachs and nausea. I was given
some on a cruise ship once for seasickness. European sailors
working during the whaling and globalization colonization kind of eras
would buy hard gingerbread to take out with them on
long voyages for the purpose of settling their stomachs. Hold up, though,
the first recipe for gingerbread may have first appeared as
(24:40):
early as two thousand four b c E out of
ancient Greece, but this according to the book Making Gingerbread
Houses by Rhonda Massingham Heart. Ancient China followed suit with
their own recipe in tenth century c E. And then yes,
by the Middle Ages, Europe had their own take. And yes,
at first it was a rich person and food. Oh yeah,
(25:01):
I mean you know you needed the sugar to make
it sweet. You needed the spices which were expensive, Oh
so expensive. Um and this year p n rsp is
closing in on our modern version. It referred to a
hard cookie that may or may not have been predecked
in gold guilding, similar to the guilding on colonial American houses.
Um and that's sometimes referred to as gingerbread work. Um
(25:24):
and These cookies were possibly shaped like kings, queens and animals.
If you were to attend to fair in England, France,
Germany and Holland during this time, you were pretty much
guaranteed to run into one of these gingerbreads, so much
so that they became known as gingerbread fairs, and the
cookies themselves were sometimes called fairingx huh. By eighty we
(25:46):
have references to a Polish version of gingerbread cookies called nicki,
derived from the word pepper. A lot of Northern European
countries words for gingerbread tend to derive from pepper, including
maybe my favorite, the Norwegian pepper packer pepper, Isn't it
fun to say? It is? That's fun? Um? In Germany,
(26:07):
these cookies often had messages on them, similar to the
candy slash sweethearts. Um, you're super all I need is
you things like that. Nuremberg was known as the gingerbread
capital of the world in the sixteen hundreds, and that
city's museum houses the oldest known recorded gingerbread recipe. To
this day, Nuremberg's gingerbread has quote protected geographical indication from
(26:32):
the European Union, like Champagne does in France. Um, they
don't make men so much as horses and hearts these days,
though I read that some other European countries kind of
look at as a skew for still making them. Yeah,
Holy Roman Emperor Frederick the Third handed out cookies that
looked like him when he was campaigning, and seasons informed
(26:55):
the shape. You'd find flowers denoted spring, for instance, or
even arm ladies looking to grant their night of choice
luck during a tournament might present him with a cookie
or would eat a gingerbread husband to put out vibes
to the universe that you're looking to secure a real,
non cookie based man. But why though, if you could
(27:16):
have a cookie, I got a big I got a
big thing for cookies. These fancy gingerbread cookies came to
personify the English elite, and there were all kinds of
shape based superstitions, doctor fidelity, a pig for luck, a
baby for a child, a lion man for virility. There
(27:38):
was even a Swedish legend that it might grant wishes.
If you held a gingerbread and the palm of your
hand made a wish and then broke it with either
your thumb or index finger, and it broke into three pieces,
your wish would come true. Clearly, clearly, have to try
that next time. The idea of decorating cookies and shaping
(27:59):
them is largely due to Elizabeth the First who elevated
the gingerbread cookie game when she made cookies in the
shapes of dignitaries on her course. And these cookies were
made by whipping up a paste and pressing that that
paste into wooden molds. And at first this paste was
a mixture of bread crumbs, almond, meile, sugar, rosewater, and ginger.
In the sixteenth century, eggs came into the equation along
(28:21):
with other sweeteners. And you can find these molds and
museums today, and you'd find these cookies at weddings and wigs.
And it was possibly accepted as currency in some parts
of Europe for a short amount of time, and a
fun story suggests that Elizabeth First would only give a
cookie modeled after your likeness to you if you were worthy.
She deemed you worthy. If she found you coming up short,
(28:44):
she'd eat the cookie head first, probably within your view,
so you knew. I went to the trouble of having
this cookie made, and I'm eating it right in front
of you, head first. Yeah, all right, all Lizzie, Which
just about brings us to the ultimate question I want
to answer, what's the deal with those gingerbread houses? The
(29:09):
deal is sixteenth century Germans and their love of the
brother's grim story of Hansel and Gretel. A lot of
you are probably like, no, dub well, I wasn't. It's
sort of a chicken and egg type thing. Though. Did
the fairy tale lead to the creation of gingerbread houses?
Did gingerbread houses inspire the fairy tale, which in turn
(29:29):
popularized the gingerbread houses mysteries of history? No one knows anyho.
These early gingerbread houses were way nicer than when I'm
used to Not only did they add that gold guilding,
but they also had gold foil wall papering. Fancy related
(29:50):
gingerbread men were thought to be baked by witches, of course,
and then used as sort of voodoo dolls to cause
pain and perhaps death. Dead authorities made the baking and
eating of gingerbread men illegal in sixteen oh seven in
an attempt to quell witchcraft. That's some serious business. Well,
you know, you're you're you're doing what you can, and
(30:14):
that's making other shapes that gingerbread men. Shakespeare mentioned gingerbread
in a play in quote, and I had but one
pity in the world. Thou shouldst have it to buy gingerbread.
Oh and John Barrett claimed it had the power to
soothe your stomach. In the sixteenth century, as ginger became
(30:35):
more affordable, gingerbread finally ventured out of the aristocratic bubble,
And sometime after this it even kind of came to
mean the reverse. Gingerbread went from denoting fancy and elegant
to poor and maybe even a feminate. The harshest of
insults um take this quote from sixty seven's The Elder Brother.
(30:57):
He has an ass a piece of gingerbread guilt over
to please foolish girls and puppets. Uh yeah, yeah, kind
of kind of an insult based on like, oh, look
at how like overlay fancy you are, look at what
a pretender. Yeah, gingerbread cookies arrived to the New World
with the columnist in Virginia, candidates might offer a cookie
(31:18):
in an attempt to win your vote. Our old pal.
Author of American cookery, Amelia Simmons her that book came
with three different recipes for gingerbread, including this one for
soft gingerbread. So it's the second recipe. Rubs three pounds
of sugar, two pounds of butter into four pounds of flour,
Add twenty eggs, four ounces of ginger, four spoons rose water,
(31:41):
and then bake as the previous recipe number one. And
this soft kind was America's preferred kind. When Marquis de
Lafayette visited the home of George Washington's mother Mary, she
made soft gingerbread for him. Um she made them in
both the shapes of eagles and kinks. Americans took the
idea of the gingerbread house and ran with it too.
(32:03):
It caught on on a more widespread level in America
than it did in Britain. And speaking of running with it,
The Gingerbread Boy was first published in eighteen seventy five,
and as it turns out there is a long tradition
in folklore of telling stories about runaway baked goods. What
there's okay. There's an in depth classification system for folklore,
(32:27):
and the gingerbread boy or gingerbread man, as we more
modernly know it, it's part of the Arena Thompson Uther type,
otherwise known as the runaway or fleeing pancake story, pancakes
gonna run away. There are all kinds of stories throughout
Europe about cakes or cookies or pancakes running off and
(32:47):
then mocking various animals and people about not being able
to catch and eat them. The the gingerbread man is
just the American version. Well, it makes more sense because
he has legs. How is it? Is it like rolling away?
You know? If I see a pancake just like rolling
I'm going to know it's the apocalypse. As by the
(33:10):
baked goods are here. They're here, and they're mocking us. Yes.
But but the first printing of the gingerbread Boy, which
probably followed a long oral tradition, was in this children's
literary journal called St. Nicholas Magazine, and the unnamed author
wrote about it. The gingerbread Boy is not strictly original.
A servant girl from Maine told it to my children.
(33:31):
It interested them so much that I thought it was
worth preserving. I asked where she found it, and she
said that an old lady told it to her in
her childhood. But this printing was more of a story
than like the kind of sing songy rhyme thing that
we know today. I think the first printed version that's
close to our our modern gingerbread man rhyme was in
(33:52):
in the Ladies Home Journal, written by one Ella M. White.
You know the whole like like run run fast as
you can, you can't catch me, a little ginger red
man sort of thing. Yeah. By the time parent w
cousins published a child book of stories in nineteen eleven,
the wording that we're more familiar with today you can't
catch me, I'm the gingerbread man, was cemented, and that
(34:15):
gingerbread recipe of Mary Ball Washington's um would wind up
getting passed down to her daughter Betty, who served it
at her own home, the ken Moore Plantation in Virginia,
and that recipe would eventually wind up saving that historical site.
Though long forgotten, it was found in the homes attic
in nine two by members of the Ken Moore Association
and the Daughters of the American Revolution who needed like
(34:38):
thirty grand to fund necessary repairs to the estate, so
they typed up the recipe. They sold copies of it
to visitors for ten cents. Apiece eventually sold the rights
to it to a company that created a like gingerbread
mix for purchasing supermarkets, who also provided it at a
discount back to chapters of the Daughters of the American Revolution,
who sold it to benefit the ken More to Gerbread Cookies,
(35:01):
saving historical saving history. Yeah, and I wanted to like
sort of wrap up. We've got a little bit of
gingerbread science, but I wanted to sort of wrap up
with um. There's this great interview that author and Burn,
author of the book American Cake, did with The Philly Voice,
and she said this about gingerbread. As years passed, the
(35:24):
recipes like gingerbread that passed down through generations were always
baked for holidays, mostly Christmas. There's a wonderful phrase I
found while researching American Cake and it goes something like this,
The holidays preserve what every day loses in short, if
it weren't for holiday baking, we wouldn't be hanging onto
old recipes like gingerbread. I like to think of gingerbread
(35:44):
is the quintessential American cake. It's a revolutionary cake, and
that our early American settlers adapted old European methods of
baking gingerbread to new ingredients and ovens. It came to
represent this new land where people of all backgrounds could
find refuge. Every gingerbread recipe baked in homes to day
can speak about the people who first made it. And
then there's the aroma in your kitchen of gingerbread being baked.
(36:06):
It just makes you smile. One whiff and you know
the holidays are here. Yeah, that's lovely. I hadn't really
thought about that, about how there's so much tradition into
the behind the foods we eat around the holidays, And really,
if that tradition wasn't there, how many of those foods
would we still me eating. Yeah, like a lot of
(36:27):
modern holiday foods can be traced really directly to like
Victorian era, which borrowed them from a lot of other
other places. And so yeah, it's fascinating it is. Meanwhile,
in the winter of the Oregon Museum of Science and
Industry had an exhibit celebrating the engineering side of gingerbread construction,
(36:51):
and every year Discovery Cube, which is a couple of
science museums in California, hosts signs of gingerbread competitions to
create impressive of gingerbread structures, and they also have a
gingerbread car derby. Like a little gingerbread you build a
little gingerbread cars, And there's a derby. I am baking
a gingerbread car this year. Oh within that gingerbread cook
(37:13):
he's going to get away, so fast get away? Oh no,
all right, Well I'm pretty good, pretty confident. You're also
pretty fast. You do a lot of running, Annie. I
think I've been training for this my whole life. I
just didn't know. Um. And I do have a few
(37:36):
a little bit of that, like gingerbread construction science for you,
some helpful hints for you to remember the next time
you're baking. Um. But first we've got one more quick
break for a word from our sponsor, and we're back.
(37:58):
Thank you sponsor. Yes cue. So, if you're looking to
construct your own gingerbread house or estate or palace or
getaway car, the internet does have some helpful hints for you.
I found an article in Popular Science called how to
Build a structurally sound Gingerbread House that was particularly useful. Um, first,
you're going to need to pick a gingerbread recipe that
(38:20):
does not use leavening agents, no eggs or baking powder
or what have you. And you're gonna need a blueprint
so that you'll know how much you need to bake
once you've got your dough rolled out, because you don't
want to use leveting agents because that will make it
puffy and therefore less sturdy. Right, my cookie recipe would
not work. No, No, you're you're gonna need to change
it up. Okay, okay, I can do that, all right.
(38:43):
And then once you have your dough rolled out, you're
gonna want to use a sharp knife to cut the
shapes of the individual pieces out of the dough prior
to baking. But don't remove the extra along the edges,
because that way you'll reduce spreading of the edges of
your shapes. Yeah, yeah, you don't. You don't want them
to thin out, no bad times. You can cut away
(39:05):
the excess after baking. Once everything's baked and cut out,
you're gonna need durable construction material, and that means proteins.
Royal icing made with egg whites, powdered sugar, and really
minimal other liquids will hold up pretty well as well.
Melted marshmallows, caramels, or gummies. Melted white chocolate can also
work well and has the advantage of firming up more
(39:26):
quickly than some of those other things. Support structures inside
the building will help distribute the weight of the walls
and the roof more evenly. And finally, Popular Science recommends
destroying your structure. I mean, you know, when you're ready, uh,
purposefully to see where the weak points are and thus
to build a better plan for next year. This is beautiful.
This sounds like a great project two for children to
(39:50):
undertake and to learn from. Right and if you want
even more specific advice and understand math a little bit
better than I do. U c L, a science and
food blog, made a really thorough post about the physics
involved called engineering the perfect gingerbread house. That's fantastic. Check
it out. I want to make one right now, and
(40:12):
there's nothing stopping you technically. I actually thought about making
cookies for this um, but we kind of randomly I
didn't think I was ever going to get to do
this in the middle of summer. Um, but I'm so excited.
I would just want to build things out of gingerbread. Yeah,
(40:34):
and think about physics, take pictures and like draw arrows.
Oh yeah, this is where the structure. Check out discovery
cubes um signs of Gingerbread competition that some of the
photos from are really gorgeous and incredibly impressive, Like they
have they have an adult and child categories, and like
(40:55):
kids as young as like five making these structures that
I don't think I could have built. So I'm like, well,
I'm okay. We should have a competition in the office.
Some people I think would be really good. Oh man,
some people would be embarrassingly good. Heck, they're gonna put
me to shame, Annie. But we get to eat it
after we do. That's true. That's all that matters in
(41:18):
the end, isn't it. It is okay, And that brings
us to the end of this classic episode on Gingerbread.
We hope that you enjoyed it, and we hope that
you're having a safe and happy holiday. Oh please, if
(41:41):
you're if you're making something or making your own traditions,
your new traditions. A virtual recipe swap would be cool. Yeah,
just yeah, let us know. Send all of those things
our way. We always love hearing from you. Our email
is hello at savorpod dot com. We are also on
social media. You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and
(42:02):
Instagram at savor pod, and we do hope to hear
from you. Savor is a production of I Heart Radio.
For more podcasts my heart Radio, you can go to
the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows. Thanks as always to our
super producers Dylan Fagin and Andrew Howard. Thanks to you
for listening, and we hope that lots more good things
are coming your way.
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