söndag, december 09, 2012

Gingerbread Day

Gingerbread has a long history. Here are some important strikes in our spicy past.

Nuns little secret
We have found records from the 1444, which describes how the nuns at Vadstena baked and ate spiced gingerbread to facilitate its digestion. At that time also included pepper, cardamom, anise, fennel, cedar oil, lemon and bitter orange peel in the dough in addition to the traditional pepparkakskryddorna cinnamon, ginger and cloves. During the Middle Ages, sweetened dough not with sugar but with honey.

The Birgittine nuns in Vadstena

Kung Hans ginger bread medicin
The Swedish-Norwegian-Danish King Hans (regent 1497-1501) was ordained gingerbread by their doctor. King suffered namely a lousy mood, and there was a general perception that it was happy to gingerbread. There are data from a pharmacy in Copenhagen to be sent home several kilos gingerbread to King Hans. The rumor that it becomes kind of gingerbread alive today, so maybe cure worked.

Hans, born Johannes, February 2, 1455, died February 20, 1513, was king of Denmark, from 1481, of Norway from 1483 and John II of Sweden from 1497 to 1501. He was the son of Christian I and Dorothea of Brandenburg, brother of Frederick I and married September 6, 1478 by Christina of Saxony (1461-1521).

Hans was born February 2, 1455 at the castle Aalborghus in Aalborg, Denmark, the son of King Christian I and were already 1456 successor to the throne in Denmark and 1458 in Norway and Sweden. At his father's dead 21 May 1481, he was only in Denmark without resistance admitted to the King, and only in 1483, at a meeting in Halmstad, even in Norway.
His own fortress gave the nobility and the clergy expanded rights and contained in addition (February 1483) important provisions, intended to consolidate all three Nordic kingdoms internal autonomy.
After being crowned the same year in Copenhagen and Trondheim he was recognized September 7 at a meeting in Kalmar, what came to be called the Kalmar Recess, the Swedish Privy Council as the King of Sweden.


Gingerbread probably used as a kind of medicine in the Middle Ages, as it contains spices cultivated for medicinal purposes. Pepper was considered to cure diarrhea and cholera. It was useful to melancholy. Ginger was good against sluggish stomachs and the toothache. Cloves which was ground and sprinkled in the hair offset cold feet and cardamom mixed in honey streaked on bruising them to become less bluish.
In the olden days included gingerbread really pepper. If you would bake gingerbread according to an old recipe, they would probably not fall modern humans in taste. They were too strong pepper. Then it meant status to afford to use spices in baking, so it was long city dwellers and wealthier people who could bake gingerbread. This practice spread to other social classes as time went on.
Pepper biscuits long regarded as a delicacy. They were cooked in the residual heat from julbaket or fried on a rock by the fire. In the 1500s it was possible to buy gingerbread in the larger cities in Sweden and in markets especially in Bergslagen where the German cultural influence was strong.

An important commodity
The first data on gingerbread as a commodity comes from the 1500s, when they were sold in monastery pharmacies and bakeries in Swedish cities as well as in markets and market days around the country.
Germany has been a pioneer in the field of gingerbread spirit. It was manufactured in Nuremberg gingerbread and Aachen. Dresden's bakers baked gingerbread and was privileged by the sachiska kings. There was a pepparkaksskrå and Weissenberg is a gingerbread museum in a bakery where it was made gingerbread from the 1680s until World War II.
It was imported gingerbread from Germany because it was available at a finer sifted flour there than what was here. Pepper biscuits had long simple shapes. They were round or square.
In the 1800s, when they became a symbol of Christmas, they began to have a different design and in the mid-1800s came hearts, goats and pigs. Figures were printed out dough using sheet templates as we do today.

Of dough left over from when you baked gingerbread can make Pepper Nuts.
Or you can try this recipe:
Pepper Nuts
about 30-40 pc
125 g butter
1 cup (a little over) sugar
1 tbsp golden syrup
1 t sk bicarbonate
1 small eggs
0.5 tbsp ground cardamom
0.5 tablespoons ground cinnamon
3 cups flour
Almonds, blanched and peeled
Stir butter, sugar and syrup porous.
Mix the bicarbonate in the egg and add it.
Mix spices and flour.
Roll the dough into lengths and split them into pieces.
Roll the pieces into balls, place on baking trays with baking paper and press an almond.
Bake at 160 ° for about 15 minutes.
Let cool on a rack.

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