Of Houses, Witches, and Gingerbread Bois

In Jack Finney's supernatural short story, "Where the Cluetts Are," a young architect tries to dissuade his nouveau riche clients, Sam and Ellie Cluett, from building a brand new Victorian mansion from one-hundred-year-old plans: "Look at the fancy trim all over the house inside and out. When those plans were drawn I suppose it could be bought from stock. Today it doesn't exist."¹ He's talking about scroll-saw cut woodwork or "gingerbread." To call fancy wood trim gingerbread was originally an insult. The invention of the scroll saw in the mid-1800s made it easy to cut curves and curlicues into boards. Because it was so popular—it defined the American Gothic and American Bracket styles (1840-1880)—it was mass-produced and relatively cheap to buy, like cut-out gingerbread cookies. (FYI: The Cluetts go ahead with the plans, with very interesting results.)

I pass one of those American Gothic houses² almost every day, but my romance with gingerbread, as both a food and a cultural icon, began long ago. Let me be clear: I was never wild about the gingerbread boy. We did have, and still have, a red plastic, boy-shaped cookie cutter, but my mother used him to make Knusperchen, a labor-intensive, rum-flavored German sugar cookie. G Boi, as we'll call him, is actually more of a mold than a cookie cutter. On a good day, you'll be able to impress the features of his rather angry little face on the dough as you cut out his body. On a bad day, his hands and feet will still be stuck in the mold when you lift it up. So G Boi spends most of his time in the cupboard. Nowadays, when I make American gingerbread cookies, I bake them in the shape of turkeys and little houses.

I bought the turkey cookie cutter in 2020, the year of my adopted hometown's tricentennial. I'm not sure how the year 1720 came to be acknowledged as our "settled" date. Dutch and British Puritans, along with their enslaved and indentured servants, both Black and white, had been living in the area since the late 1600s, and a branch of the native Lenape people a whole lot longer, but the "settling" business is muddled by an ongoing kerfuffle between two groups known as the Proprietors (established by Lord John Berkeley and Sir George Carteret) and the Associators, aka "Clinker Lot Right Men"—a kerfuffle I'm sure Lin Manuel Miranda would want to make into a musical, if only he knew about it. The town was named Turkey after the wild turkeys that rambled throughout the Great Swamp and Watchung Mountains before they were hunted to extinction. The name was changed to New Providence in 1759, after the balcony of the Presbyterian Church collapsed during the Sunday service and no one was killed or even seriously maimed. The wild turkeys, I'm happy to report, were successfully re-introduced in the 1980s. I once had to break for a tom loitering in the middle of Springfield Avenue, a road established by the Lenape.

I bought the house-shaped cookie cutters, one with a window, one with a chimney, in honor of our Salt Box Museum. A salt box house is a small farmhouse with a kitchen shed tacked on the back, giving its profile the shape of the lidded boxes the settlers of the time used to keep salt in. Witches might prefer the southern term for this kind of roofline: cat's slide. There's only one place you can get my turkey- and house-shaped gingerbread cookies: the bake sale table beside the Salt Box Museum at one of our historical society's annual events. (The tri-centennial celebration was, unfortunately, scrubbed by Covid-19.) I've also been known to bring gingerbread fishes and white-iced ghosts to our fairs. The variety of shapes is in keeping with the medieval tradition of baking different shapes for different fairs. It was at these seasonal fairs that "gingerbread" first became synonymous with "cheap," for what boy couldn't afford to buy his girl a crispy gingerbread "fairing?" More recent fairings are baked in simple rounds, but in the old days, they would be cut out like flowers in the springtime and witches for All Hallows' Eve.

Often, it was a girl buying the gingerbread, and not just to eat, for gingerbread didn't just taste good; it was magic. A young woman without suitors might eat a gingerbread "husband" to attract the real thing. If she had her eye on a particular fellow, she could feed him the husband to win him over. She might even seal the deal by eating a gingerbread rabbit, which would help her get pregnant. (I have a rabbit-shaped cookie-cutter, too.) I was surprised to learn of the connection between gingerbread and low magic, but I was not surprised that rabbits were a part of it. Long before they started jumping out of magician's hats, Old World rabbits, and their larger hare cousins, were as closely associated with witches in the popular imagination as black cats are today. On the Isle of Jersey, the hare is one of the witch's favored forms, and hares and rabbits are considered such bad omens that Jersey fishermen won't even speak the words while at sea.

For a long time, I was under the impression that our good friend Lord Berkeley was from the Isle of Jersey. He was not, but his fellow Proprietor Sir George Carteret was once Governor of the Isle of Jersey. The old Jersey was named in honor of Julius Caesar at a time when "Caesar" was pronounced more like the modern Italian Cesare, i.e. Che'-sah-ray. Say it five times fast and it starts to sound like "Jersey." Some early documents use the name Nova Caesarea for the lands now known as New Jersey. New Jersey's Pine Barrens were home to at least one witch, Old Mother Clevenger (d. 1857), who, according to legend, could turn herself into a hare. But Old Mother Clevenger was Hessian, not Jèrriais, as people from the Isle of Jersey are sometimes called.

So when did my fascination with gingerbread begin? It's hard to say. It may have been the first time I tasted soft gingerbread, on a Girl Scout camp-out in Jockey Hollow near Morristown, New Jersey. There are those who claim that Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" was actually inspired by the story of a ghostly, nearly headless Hessian horseman from Jockey Hollow. We didn't see any ghosts on our camp-out.³ As I recall, we entertained ourselves with stories of Jack the Ripper while we ate our warm gingerbread by the fire. We weren't exactly roughing it; we slept in cabins, not tents, and after one day of steady rain, we packed up and went home.

When I was thirteen, I fell in love with the Middle Ages, and I was enchanted by the idea that gyngerbrede dated all the way back to the 1100's. I still didn't love the molasses-heavy taste of the American gingerbread boy. It would be several more decades before I realized that gingerbread, both hard and soft, was part of the same family as the more elaborately spiced, honey-sweetened Lebkuchen and Pfefferkuchen we ate at home on candlelit Advent Sundays. (The gingerbread house that Hansel and Gretel lived to regret chewing on, and that people all over the world now build at Christmastime, is called, in German, a Hexenhäuschen, "little witch's house," or a Knusperhäuschen, "crunchy little house.")

Soft gingerbread is another of my favorite recipes to bring to our Salt Box fairs. A historical society bake sale table should be stocked with historical foods, and, at the time the house was built, soft gingerbread was the special occasion cake in the former colonies. The fairs occur in May, June, and September, i.e. not months when I want to be producing Christmassy aromas in my kitchen. American gingerbread recipes call for few or no spices other than powdered ginger root. Neither gingerbread nor Lebkuchen were originally Christmas foods—they weren't even, necessarily, Christian—but in my mind, the symphony of smells that surround the making of Lebkuchen—cinnamon, cloves, cardamom, and lemon peel—are part of the magic of Christmas. To make Lebkuchen at any other time of year would be like putting up the tree in July or opening the doors marked "24" on my Advent calendar before Christmas Eve. It would kill the magic. American gingerbread, however, is acceptable all year round.

As for G Boi, he's not going anywhere. For one thing, he's now an antique. And just because he and I don't get on well doesn't mean that my children or their children, or whoever inherits my cookie-cutters, might not bond with him someday. As for Sam and Elsie Cluett, they now spend all their time inside that brand new Victorian mansion. They keep mostly to themselves, but if they do let you inside the gates, and it happens to be Christmastime on the grounds, please do ask Ellie for her gingerbread recipe. I'm sure she has one by now.

To read more about historic American houses, see How Old Is This House?: A Skeleton Key to Dating and Identifying Three Centuries of American Houses by Hugh Howard. If you want to know more about the history of New Providence, New Jersey, the New Providence Historical Society publishes a newsletter called Turkey Tracks. See also From The Passaiack To The Wach Unks: A History of the Township of Berkeley Heights, N. J.. (Why Berkeley Heights and not New Providence? It's a long story!) You can find instructions for making your own gingerbread witch's house in my 2013 book, The Old Magic of Christmas. For gingerbread history, arcana, and recipes (and more about Old Mother Clevenger), see my latest book, The Secret History of Christmas Baking: Recipes and Stories from Tomb Offerings to Gingerbread Boys. Not an adventurous baker? That's okay. I'm pretty sure the warm, soft gingerbread I ate as a Girl Scout—and which I never forgot—was made from a Betty Crocker mix. I highly recommend it, with a scoop of vanilla ice cream and a few spooky stories on the side.

¹Jack Finney. About Time: Twelve Short Stories. New York: A Fireside Book, 1986. Page 119.

²Like the house in "Where the Cluetts Are," this one is a 20th-century recreation. It's a fairly small house, and when it was built in the 1970s, it was a shop. The little American Gothic and its fellow faux-historic specimens, including an adorable 1860ish octagon house, have since been turned into condominiums. You can read more about the complex, in which I do not have the pleasure of living, in my article "Hollies I Have Known" in Llewellyn's 2016 Herbal Almanac. Sadly, the jolly old holly tree I wrote about is gone.

³We didn't see the Jersey Devil either, though it's said that a Girl Scout troop camping in the nearby Great Swamp in the 1960's did. If it's true, the Devil was far from his home in the Pine Barrens.