Gingerbread Part 1

Nowadays they're made by little kids in daycare classes or Girl Scout meetings, out of graham crackers glued together using tubes of store-bought frosting, and decorated with peppermints and M&Ms, but when I was a kid, gingerbread houses were in their glory. Their proliferation, during the 1960's and 60's was, I think, another result of the Feminine Mystique. Intelligent women, kept at home by the expectations of the time, needed an outlet for their creativity. For the rest of the year maybe, knitting or Paint-By-Number would do, but during December, they made gingerbread houses.

Here is Betty Crocker's picture of what one was supposed to look like, from the classic 1963 edition of the Betty Crocker Cooky Book, the edition my generation grew up with, that we all studied when we wanted to try baking, or to beg our mothers to make cookies for us:



My own mom made gingerbread houses every Christmas for several years in a row, enough years that I was quite shocked, and outraged, the year she said she wasn't going to do it any more.

"Make one yourself, if you want one so badly," she told me. And so I did.

I am here to tell you, that making gingerbread houses back then, was a labor-intensive process. Nowadays you can find ready-made pans; all you have to do is glop your dough into them and bake, and wa-la, perfect walls, roof, etc. Back when I was young, first you made your gingerbread dough. You chilled it, you rolled it out, then you laid it carefully onto un-greased cookie sheets, trying very hard to get it smooth, so your walls would come out flat. After you'd baked it, you used paper patterns that you'd made by scaling up the template-pattern in the Cooky Book to cut out your various house-pieces.

Then you waited. Your walls and roof had to be perfectly dry before you were going to be able to put together a house -- Believe me, I know; my house looked like it had been through the San Francisco earthquake, there were so many cracks and cemented-together broken bits. -- You stuck the pieces together, using a special, hard-drying type of frosting that you made yourself, again following the instructions from Betty Crocker. Finally, after you'd taken pains to decorate it as nicely as possible, and set it on display for an admiring family until well after Christmas, then was when you were able to eat it.

And then was when you found out that a properly-made gingerbread house is inedible, at least for anyone over the age of 5. By the time the gingerbread has hardened enough to stay together in the form of a house, it's not only totally and totally hard, but close to flavorless as well. The special hard-dry frosting has no taste at all besides a vague sweetness. And as for the candies you put on so carefully to make it look "special", well those have all fallen off by then, and your little sisters or your dad have taken them away and eaten them. I was never so disappointed by anything in my life, than I was by that damn house I made, and I understood finally, why my mom had stopped making them.

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