Fun Christmas Facts - The History of Gingerbread Men

By Gwen Nicodemus 

Gingerbread has been around for a long time, but the recipes used to make it have changed considerably over the years. Initially gingerbread was made from breadcrumbs, ginger, and a sweetener, like honey. People discovered that ginger has preservative properties and used it accordingly.

The recipe for gingerbread changed, and by the 15th century (the 1400s), the breadcrumbs had been replaced by flour. Honey was replaced with molasses. The biscuit became lighter. Some recipes made sweet, thin crisps of ginger and others were thicker and more biscuit-like.

Pictoral scenes that told stories were carved in wood and the gingerbread was rolled and pressed into them.

It was first made into figures (like people) n the 16th century (the 1500s). Queen Elizabeth I of England is credited with the first gingerbread men.

Queen Elizabeth was queen of England starting in November of 1558. (She was the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn.) Queen Elizabeth was known for having well dressed courtiers in her court. She has been credited with the first gingerbread men. The story goes that she had gingerbread cookies made and decorated to look like her favorite courtiers, and had the cookies presented to them.

Gingerbread men tend to have vague shapes. For instance, the legs do not have definite feet, and they certainly don't have any toes. The arms don't have definite arms, and they definitely don't have any fingers. Gingerbread women are equally simple in design. Gingerbread expands when it bakes, even recipes without eggs. As a consequence, the cookies work better when they are not overly detailed.

The detail work comes into play when you decorate these cookies.

So, gingerbread men and women needed houses, chairs, tables, beds, wagons, trees, and livestock that is also made out of gingerbread, and bakers created these.

The Brothers Grimm wrote Hansel and Gretel in 1812. The story told of a witch that wanted to eat the children, Hansel and Gretel. She fattened them up with candy and other sweets, and the children munched on a house made of gingerbread. Gingerbread houses became popular at that time, especially in Germany.

Gingerbread houses are popular in the United States and many parts of Europe, but oddly, not England. These houses are most common during the Christmas season, but also work well for every other holiday. Valentine's Day houses are decorated with pink, red, and white candy. Halloween houses have ghosts popping out of them and are often purposely constructed "wrong." The only limits with gingerbread houses are your imagination and the size of your cookie sheets. (I like to design one or two each year from index cards. Remember that gingerbread is thicker than paper, but put together the cards into whatever kind of house you can design.)

My favourite recipe for gingerbread houses is called " the alternate recipe." I replace the shortening with butter and use corn syrup instead of molasses.

Gwen Nicodemus is a freelance engineer/writer and a homeschooling mom. Visit her website, Notion Nexus, for unit studies, worksheets, notes, and educational videos.

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The Sweet Taste of Desserts and the Way It Can Open Your Horizons   by Yoav Shai

Some things will never change, no matter how much we grow and look at the world surrounding us in a sarcastic point of view. Just open your eyes and you will find the things that takes you back to the innocent days of your childhood. The scent of fresh fruits, the taste of the air after a stormy weather, the feel of your skin after a warm wind catches your breath, the sound of a newly sprouting flower. These are just a few of the sensual feelings that draws you back in time to wake you from the unexciting times, when every new sensation was new, sharp as a knife.

During the long years of our growing stages, we tend to lose the ability to enjoy our senses the way we did as children. This is the cause of way we are socialized and educated into the full grown, productive members of the society, leaving them emotionally maimed, like trained dogs who lost their ability to express their feelings with a simple bark.

The only sense that in some way keeps its connection to our emotional state of mind is the taste sense. But even this is not quite correct. The one taste that really connect us to the childhood is the sweet liberating taste of a high quality dessert. Not every sweet candy could do the trick. If you really want to kick start your senses you would have to choose something more than just the plain lollypop. This is due to the extant use of artificial sweeteners in the commercial candies. In homemade desserts and in the ones served in fine restaurants, in the other hand, you would see more and more use in the good old fashioned sugar, which gives your taste bulbs the exact push it needs to boost you up to high levels of ecstatic consciousness.

This is one of reasons we see in the past few years what you can call "the revival of home cooking". More and more people start to realize that in the past decades they have lost the control of what they enter their bodies, and that there are consequences. The internet helped a lot in this new trend of home cooking. Today, more than ever, it is easy to find any recipe you like in a matter of seconds, and thus opening the world of cooking to ones who had never practiced such an exciting experience.

All you have to do is just look for the dessert you would like to try, and you could make it in no time. Craving for a sweet old fashioned black forest cake? Got an itch for a Spanish Churros recipe? Woke up with an urge for a strawberry creme brulee? All you have to do is look it up, get the right ingredients and surprise yourself while finding out how easy it is to make your own desserts. You would be surprised even more when you first taste your own making and rediscover the enjoyable senses long lost.

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