Gingerbread - back to the future

Christmas is the special feast of the year of the cereals. It is also the time for home baked breads and cakes. During rather few weeks, the Swedes spend a lot of time making breads and cakes in order to visualize their link back in time, both to the family and to the geographic place of birth. Unusual breads are baked, and sometimes the cookies are so unusual that they can only be bought at specialized bakeries.

Christmas - the balancing of the agricultural books 

Further back in history, breads and cakes, and of course the whole series of Christmas parties, were an opportunity to show off the financial state for the farm at a time where the results of the year's agricultural work were evaluated. Foods that required high cooking skills were combined with limited commodities.

The oldest of our Christmas cookies are likely the fried pastries called “klenäter” or “klenor”, well known in norther Europe since the 1400s under different names, but may be even older. This very unusual cake, today fried in some kind of oil, was previously cooked in pigs fat or sheeps fat. Just frying is a rare form of cooking in the food culture because of the everyday lack of all kinds of fats. The cooking method of boiling in liquid fat is therefore a result of upper-class cooking and a distinctive celebrative cookie. The cooking style of Swedish food culture has been characterized primarily by boiling in water and secondarily by frying in a pan.

The “klenät” cookies also contain rare festive ingredients like wheat flour, butter and cream. Sometimes also sugar, a luxury product before the beets and industrial sugar in the middle of the 1800s.

Important sieving

Before the 19th century extensive plant breeding, there were many regional variations of cereals. In the cultivation, different kinds of cereals were grown together to support each other if the year was wet. When the crops were harvested and after that threshed, farmers did not always make a distinction between which grains who was intended for the flour, so they created a mixed flour. The distinguished feast bread was therefore seldom the cereal variety, but a question if the flour was properly sieved, and if the bread was baked without the contents of the hull, bran and sprout which was the distinctive feature of the everyday bread.

From festivity to everyday life

Gingerbread cookies are an old festive cake that was served not only for Christmas but also for weddings. It is known in historical sources, since at least the 16th century, through its precious ingredients: white flour, sugar and spices. In the 17th century recipe, it is flavoured with lemon and nutmeg as well as pepper. It is a spice mixture to recommend! That old cake have a very aromatic taste, but they become stony. Therefore, they were probably dipped in hot wine, tea or coffee at that time to make them softer.

In the 19th century, these flavours were replaced and we meet the tastes we recognize today, such as ginger and spice pepper. The use of ginger whistles about a western flavour: English gingerbreads. The increased use of fat in the 19th century in the gingerbreads also made them more tender and easier to chew.

The factory-baked gingerbread cookies are still popular today and are found in most workplaces’ coffee rooms, despite the criticism of the content of palm oil. But for Christmas, many bake their own cakes made on more classic ingredients like butter, and the most important role of gingerbread is to contribute to a social community, not least to let the children participate in a many century-long taste story. One can also assume that the few who eat themselves to bad health do not do it with the help of gingerbread.

Painted cakes

Today, the gingerbread is baked with freshly ground wheat flour. Before the 19th century, wheat crops were limited, and the wheat flour places itself as a flour for rare cakes and bread in an upper-class environment, or at least as a festive food. However, cakes for festivities could in older days be baked on finely ground rye flour. Gingerbread baked on rye as tho only grain  produce a very nice and more diverse flavour. Sometimes the gingerbread dough was mixed with finely ground barley flour to create a whiter cake. The precociousness of the southeastern Asian spices before the 1700s meant that they often were crushed into a powder. The spices were then mixed with aquavit and brushed on the cakes. That was also done with the saffron buns, which were only saffron-yellow on the outside.

From cake to seasoning

A trend today is that gingerbread has gone from being just a cake to become a spice or flavour. It is now possible to buy crispy butterscotch with a gingerbread flavour, soft candies with a taste of gingerbread but also protein powder with a taste of this Christmas cake for those who build their body but want to be part of the tradition. The gingerbread can always meet the wishes of the future.

Back to the future

In our time, climate change challenges the growing conditions of cereal crops. SLU's scientist now takes up the forgotten cereals of an older variety such as old rye and old wheat, to see if they may better adapt to changing cultivation conditions. An important future issue is finding varieties that work in extreme weather situations, but also with improved nutritional properties to compensate for more varied harvests.

The new-born varieties must also work when baking bread, so the consumer does not turn their back on these new and climate adapted breads. An un-eaten bread does not contribute to health or to social or biological sustainability.

Formas has recently given support to a SLU project where Göran Bergkvist, associate professor of plant cultivation at SLU, will work with field trials to see how certain selected cultures of older crop types work in the organic cultivation.

– The research assignment is divided into ways that are not only about cereals that can dry and soak better, but also if the varieties are interesting for consumers to eat, says Bergkvist. He also emphasizes that it is important for the project to be involved in the whole food chain, from ear to loaf.

– We want to find older varieties with good nutritional value, but that also works in mills and baking ovens, says Bergkvist. It is a good example that food production as well as the consumer’s eating is a multidisciplinary issue for a sustainable future.

Most likely, the varieties will work very well for all the cakes and bread of Christmas, because they were in some cases baked on these older crop varieties already at the time when the Viking midwinter blot became the Christmas feast.