The Queen's Gingerbread Men

Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603), displaying a wicked sense of humor, loved to surprise her courtiers and visitors with gingerbread men made in their own likenesses.

In the kitchen, the queen's baker cooked together honey, bread crumbs (as flour), pepper, sometimes saffron to give a red color, and ginger. He pressed the dough into hand-carved wooden molds and let it dry so that he could pop the cookie out of the mold with one good whack against the table. Since the dough was already cooked and he did not add leavening or bake it, the cookie retained all its detail. (Today, with modern gingerbread cookie recipes, we get the Pillsbury Doughboy, as far as detail goes.) Then he decorated it with white icing and highlighted it with gold leaf.

Now the Greeks and Romans used ginger in cooking, and we know this because we have records. For instance, the Roman government taxed ginger when Arab traders brought it across the Red Sea from its native China and India to the port at Alexandria. When Rome fell, usually dated to Alaric the Goth's Sack of Rome, 410 AD, ginger was no longer traded.

The Crusaders (our erstwhile Jihadists) brought ginger and other spices back to the West in the eleventh century. Monks were the first to make gingerbread. Later bakers took over the work, and the first bakers' guild we know of comes into existence in 1162 in Pontoise, France. By 1415, gingerbread bakers on the Continent formed their own guilds.

In London, bakers formed guilds as early as 1155, but gingerbread bakers did not become a separate body. In 1569, Queen Elizabeth united the white-flour and brown-flour baking guilds to form the Worshipful Company of Bakers.

Although gingerbread cookies had become popular "fairings" (that is, treats sold at fairs) and street novelties, they were originally molded as scenes from Bible stories and later as secular images of all kinds. Elizabeth was apparently the first to think of molding them into portraits, or maybe I should say caricatures, of members of her circle.

Unfortunately I have not spent hours and days in a wonderful, possibly (in my imagination) bookwormy and musty old British library, but have rather done my usual research: dilittantish-ly poking around the web until I come up with a story that rings true to me.

But just imagine Elizabeth's delight as one of her hapless suitors or a wily diplomat from France or Spain has to bite his own head off in order to consume his treat.



Today's gingerbread men.

This image, which was originally posted to Flickr.com, was uploaded to Commons using Flickr upload bot on 18:52, 9 May 2008 (UTC) by Themightyquill (talk).