Gingerbread refers to baked goods flavored with ginger, cloves, nutmeg or cinnamon. It may be in the form of a soft cake or a thin, firm cookie. It is usually sweetened with honey, molasses or sugar. The name, gingerbread, is based on preserved ginger root.

Ginger root was first cultivated in China and used as a medical treatment for stomach problems. The root was preserved by cooking in sugar, drying or grinding into a powder. It was used in baked products that appeared in Europe in the tenth century, having come from Armenia.

In Germany the baking of gingerbread was controlled by baker's guilds. The bread was molded in elaborately carved wooden boards in the images of saints and well-known public figures. At Christmas and Easter the common people were allowed to bake their own gingerbread. During the rest of the year, the cookies were baked in the shapes of flowers and animals with a decoration of icing.

Gingerbread houses originated in Germany in the sixteenth century. They were associated with the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel. Creating a gingerbread house is a holiday project for many families today. There is a national gingerbread house competition in Asheville, North Carolina each year. The houses are on display from November through January. They must be edible and seventy-five percent of the creation must be of gingerbread. The rest is in the decorations.

By the thirteenth century gingerbread was brought to Sweden by German immigrants. Nuns baked and sold it to the public for medicinal purposes.

Queen Elizabeth I served the first gingerbread men. They were decorated to depict various dignitaries who came to visit her. The English people became very fond of gingerbread cookies (or biscuits). There were village fairs celebrating the virtues of gingerbread.

When the English colonists came to these shores, they brought gingerbread recipes with them. Amelia Simmons published the first American cookbook in 1796. She included seven different recipes for gingerbread in her book. In the state of Virginia it is said gingerbread cookies were used to sway voters in a local election.

The Boston Cooking School of 1896 contains eight recipes for gingerbread plus three more recipes for molasses cookies containing ground ginger. It was a popular cookbook in the late nineteenth century and the first to give directions for precisely measuring the ingredients in a recipe.

We know Clara Sandburg baked cookies because her son Carl remembered filching them from the container on the top shelf in the kitchen. They may have been gingerbread cookies which were part of a long tradition in Swedish baking. They can be eaten all year around.