Gingerbread History by Maya Corrigan Potluck Monday

2021 gingerbread house by Kai and Oscar

Gingerbread cookies and houses, like the one my grandsons made, have a long history. Two queens of England helped to popularize gingerbread. The term derives from gigembras, an Old French word for gingered food. Marco Polo brought ginger to the West from China in the 13th century. Initially rare and expensive, the spice became widely available and cheap over the next few centuries.

Queen Elizabeth I craved gingerbread during her reign (1558-1603), employing a baker whose sole purpose was to make that sweet. She commanded the baker to decorate gingerbread men in the likenesses of visiting dignitaries and her suitors as party favors. History doesn’t record if a suitor who’d fallen out of favor got no sweets or if the queen consumed his gingerbread likeness as a public brush-off. Watching the queen decapitate your gingerbread effigy wasn’t such a bad fate, considering that others who displeased her were beheaded for real.

Vendor at a gingerbread fair (Wikimedia)

Commoners bought their sweets at gingerbread fairs. Many believed certain shapes of gingerbread were charmed. Those hoping to ward off evil devoured heart-shaped pieces. Consuming gingerbread rabbits was supposed to increase fertility. Young unmarried women ate man-shaped gingerbread figures called “husbands” in hopes of attracting a live husband.

The line between a lucky charm and a bad omen is thin. Within a few years of Queen Elizabeth’s death, superstitions were rampant that human-shaped sweets had demonic powers. Witches supposedly made gingerbread figures, ate them, and thereby caused the death of their enemies. The Brothers Grimm drew on this folklore for their tale of a cannibalistic witch luring children into a gingerbread house. To save themselves, Hansel and Gretel push the witch into the oven where she planned to roast them. A pretty grim tale. Ironically, its publication in 1812 made candy-studded gingerbread houses trendy in Germany.

Image courtesy of Pixabay

When Queen Victoria ruled (1837-1901), she imported and popularized German holiday traditions from her husband’s homeland. Those included baking and decorating elaborate gingerbread houses and hanging sweets on evergreen trees. The queen probably didn't foresee gingerbread house kits in supermarkets, but she'd recognize the gingerbread men we put on our Christmas trees and cookie platters.

The association of gingerbread men and death persists in a Halloween treat known as a gingerdead man, which has skeleton bones traced in white icing. This version of the sweet appears on the cover of my 7th Five-Ingredient Mystery featuring café manager Val Deniston and her live-wire grandfather. During Bayport's Dickens of a Holiday festival, Val hosts a private tea party for the volunteers dressed as Dickens characters, Santa, and Mrs. Claus. Then an unexpected guest arrives, shrouded in black like the eeriest Dickens ghost, and hands out skeletal gingerbread men. The insatiable Santa can't resist even a creepy cookie and chomps it down. When he keels over, Val and Granddad have a cookie-cutter killer to catch.

"If you are looking to settle in with a well plotted cozy this Christmas, Gingerdead Man is for you. Grab a gingerbread man and some hot chocolate and enjoy." -- Mark Baker, Carstairs Considers

 Purchase Links and Sample Chapter

Just in time for the holidays e-book of Gingerdead Man is 99 cents, available at Amazon,  Kobo, Barnes and Noble, Google play, Apple Books or wherever e-books are sold.

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You’ll find recipes for many varieties of gingerbread on Mystery Lovers' Kitchen. Though the giveaways associated with the recipes listed below are over, you can still . . .

Enter a giveaway for Gingerdead Man and books Tina Kashian, Lucy Burdette, and Peg Cochran by leaving a comment on yesterday’s post.

Lucy Burdette's Old-Fashioned Gingerbread

Mary Jane Maffini's Chocolate Gingerbread Loaves 

Peg Cochran's Warm Gingerbread with Whipped Cream 

Maya Corrigan’s Gingerbread Bar Cookies 

Maya Corrigan’s Gingerdead Man Cookies

For the earlier history of gingerbread, from ancient times and through the Middle Ages, read my CrimeReads article, The Surprisingly Dark History of Gingerbread.  

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Maya Corrigan writes the Five-Ingredient Mysteries featuring café manger Val and her live-wire grandfather solving murders in a Chesapeake Bay town. Maya lives in a Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. Before writing crime fiction, she taught American literature, writing, and detective fiction at Northern Virginia Community College and Georgetown University. When not reading and writing, she enjoys theater, travel, trivia, cooking, and crosswords. Visit her website for book news, easy recipes, mystery trivia, and a free culinary mystery story.

Will you be eating gingerbread this holiday season?