National Gingerbread Cookie Day on November 21st encourages us to grab the rolling pin and cookie cutters. The baking will warm the home and decorating will inspire us to design tasty cookies while making memories!
- A favorite food of an Armenian monk, Gregory of Nicopolis, brought gingerbread to Europe around 992 AD and taught French Christians to bake it.
- Gingerbread was often used in religious ceremonies and was baked to be sturdy as it was usually molded into images of saints.
- Gingerbread cookies also make sturdy walls for sweet houses and the day is just in time for some practice before National Gingerbread House Day on December 12th. Don’t forget to make those tasty gingerbread families that can be decorated by the children in your home.
- The ingredients that make gingerbread so special include molasses, ginger, cinnamon, allspice, and cloves. Brown sugar adds a little more sweetness and a crispness to the outer crust. Flour and butter combine to make a sturdy final product perfect for building your dream house.
- The “gingerbread house” became popular in Germany after the Brothers Grimm published Hansel and Gretel in the 19th century.
- The term gingerbread is from the Latin term zingiber via old French gingebras, meaning preserved ginger.
- Catholic monks used to make gingerbread in the shape of angels and saints
- A doctor once wrote a prescription for gingerbread to the Swedish King Hans to cure his depression.
- Queen Elizabeth I is credited with the first gingerbread men.
- According to the Swedish tradition, you can put the gingerbread in your palm and make a wish. You then have to break the gingerbread with your other hand. If the gingerbread breaks into three, the wish will come true.
- Folk medicine practitioners created gingerbread men to help young women to marry the man of their dreams. If she could get him to eat it, then it was believed he would fall madly in love with her.
- Nuremberg, Germany has the title, “Gingerbread Capital of the World”.
- It is believed gingerbread was first baked in Europe at the end of the 11th century when returning crusaders brought back the custom of spicy bread from the Middle East. Ginger was not only tasty, it had properties that helped preserve the bread.
- In the 13th century in the Polish city of Torun gingerbread began to be produced and quickly gained fame in the country and abroad, it was then brought to Sweden by German immigrants.
- The first documented trade of gingerbread biscuits in England dates to the 17th century, where they were sold in monasteries, pharmacies, and town square farmers’ markets. In England, gingerbread was thought to have medicinal properties.
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