Let’s travel back to Framingham Centre Common in 1835. With 10 days til Christmas, what yummy smells would be wafting from Mrs. Gordon’s boarding house on Central Street? The distinctive smell of gingerbread being made.
From the handwritten recipe book of Mrs. Gordon (General George H. Gordon’s mother):
Soft Gingerbread [ p. 1]
Six teacups of flour 3 of molasses 1 of cream 1 of butter
a spoonful of pea lash* and ginger to suit the taste
*probably pearl ash, a kind of fixed alkaline salt, prepared in various parts of Europe, and also in America, by melting and extracting the salts from the ashes of burnt vegetables.