Gingerbread House Display	2006 Contest Winner

^{You are invited to view the display of gingerbread houses. Fascinate your child as you a walk through a life size “Candyland” escorted by a real gingerbread man.}

^{A history of herbs, gardens, education and food make Herb N Ewe the most admirable site for this holiday adventure. Located on the historic National Road (us 40) the herb farm actually rests on a abandoned piece of the road built in 1832 boasting days gone by of wagon trains and pioneer women traveling westward; some of them lucky enough to bring herbs, spices and even ginger.  Hosting a schedule of workshops, special holiday and theme dinners, private garden weddings and corporate functions.  Herb N Ewe will be extending its holiday hours from 10 am to 9 pm every day during the gingerbread season.  Lunch and dinner reservations are required; corporate holiday parties are booked early and high “Candyland” tour bus traffic is anticipated.  This holiday; you can make a memory that will last a lifetime; visit Herb N Ewe, discover the southeast rolling hills of Licking County.}  

^{Our world is abound this holiday season with ginger and you can experience a variety of lunch and dinner selections made with fresh ginger. Also available each day;  high tea served at 2:30 pm.  Start with a Jamaican ginger tea; followed with savory orange ginger breads and a variety of desserts including gingerbread man cookies, dark warm ginger bread, and spiced cake.}

                          History of Gingerbread 

 ^{Gingerbread has been baked in Europe for centuries. Each region was different; a soft, delicately spiced cake; a crisp flat cookie, or a warm, thick, steamy-dark square of "bread," sometimes served with lemon sauce or whipped cream. Gingerbread could be light, sometimes dark, sometimes sweet, sometimes spicy, but it was almost always cut into shapes such as men, women, stars or animals, and colorfully decorated or stamped with a mold and dusted with white sugar to make the impression visible. It was only in the fifteenth century that the term came to be applied to a kind of cake made with treacle and flavored with ginger. Ginger was also discovered to have a preservative effect when added to pastries and bread, and this probably led to the development of recipes for ginger cakes, cookies and flavored breads.  In Medieval England gingerbread meant simply "preserved ginger" and was a corruption of the Old French gingebras, derived from the Latin name of the spice, Zingebar.  True ginger root is Zingiber officinale ( zing-ee-ber oh-fiss-ih-NAH-lee) a rhizome that can be used fresh, candied or ground into ginger powder. The generic name for ginger is - sringavera—meaning "root shaped like a horn" because of its passing resemblance to an animal horn.  The spice originated in Asia, though now it is grown mostly in Jamaica. The ancient Chinese used it as a medical treatment; the Romans used it extensively to flavor their foods and taxed it heavily—it almost certainly came overland from India—and the Japanese still use pink pickled ginger, called gari, as the familiar condiment for sushi. Medicinally it slows down digestion and has excellent antibiotic properties for colds and sinus.}

^{The widespread passion for spices in Medieval Europe (partly to cover up the taste of meats preserved through the winter without the benefits of refrigeration) included ginger, and the spice merchants took advantage of this by charging high prices. Ginger was the second most highly traded spice after pepper.}

^{Generations of North Americans have been baking gingerbread using time-honored traditions from ancestral Northern Europe.  True to American Culture, old world recipes were modernized and romanticized with flavors of cardamom, cloves, cinnamon, anise and ginger; and German fairy tales brought us Hanzel and Gretel, two abandoned children who discovered a house in the woods made with bread and decorated ornately with candies and cakes.}

^{Changes began with the development of cookie cutters—emphasizing the outline of the cookie rather than its surface. "Hard" gingerbreads had emigrated with early settlers in various ethnic forms. In Pennsylvania, they were shaped by hand into little pudgy men; the English simply cut them from rolled dough with a glass or a teacup.  It remained for the growing nineteenth-century tin industry in America to develop the primitive art form of cookie cutters from the Pennsylvania Dutch tinsmiths.}

^{Later cookies shaped with tin cutters became tree ornaments. They were first hung on the early tabletop trees, and later adorned the larger floor ones.  Annual holiday baking sprees produced the multi-form cookies destined for decorations, stockings, and platters—usually "several wash baskets full."  As was reported in the York True Democrat in 1868, "Cakes of various forms and quality droop from the different limbs, birds of paradise, humming birds, robins, peewees, and a variety of others seem to twitter among the evergreens." And of course the usual old figures and local motifs abounded—stars, moons, and suns, boys’ and girls’ toys, animals, and human figures were common, and later the evolved Santa figure. During the late nineteenth century, with increasingly commercial Christmas observance, they took on the created images of the season—wreaths, stars, Santa’s, elves, stockings, snowmen, trees, sleds, toys. And no bakery window could do without gingerbread houses.  In the 1950’s a California women designed; what for many of us was our first board game called “Candyland”; her goal was to entertain children with polio (being a victim herself). The first gingerbread board game was decorated with gingerbread playing pieces that met game board challenges such as ‘gum drop pass, Peppermint stick forest, where Mr. Mint lives among peppermint as tall as trees and then Lolly, dancing in the twinkle lights at lollypop woods. More recent board revisions show you’ll find princess Frostine at Snow Flake Lake and Lord Licorice at Licorice Lake. The winner of the game reaches the gingerbread cottage at the end and discovers “Home Sweet Home”.}

^{These holiday motifs are still popular today; Candyland Board games are now available on DVD and celebrating over 50 years of popularity and thankfully polio is almost a thing of the past.  Tin cookie cutters still remain as a standby in home kitchens, and their proliferating patterns characterize much of our holiday baking. With the common problem of limited time for baking these days, we may be returning to a situation in which they are limited to Christmas again. And the gingerbread boys and houses so reminiscent of Hansel and Gretel somehow remain. While in the past, the more ambitious cooks (and certainly bakeries) designed and constructed their own edible edifices. Now one can buy kits to mold a solid gingerbread cake-house; still wonderful but blandly all looking the same. Perhaps it is telling that these "soft gingerbreads," or light cakes, were a mostly an American offshoot of the gingerbread family, and were not previously considered Christmas specialties. Such cakes filled an altogether different place in culinary history, being the province of home bakers rather than commercial bakeries, and enjoyed year round as a homemade staple dessert.}  

^{If you go: Herb N Ewe is just north of interstate 70; on St Rt 40 (National Road) 5 miles west of exit 152 or 5 miles east of exit 132.  Their hours during gingerbread season are 10 am to 9 pm November 28th through December 23rd.  Reservations for lunch or dinner are required. You can reach them at 740-323-2264 or log on to www.herbnewe.com}

click on Gingerbread Season 2008.