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Holidays: Sugar shacks
How Hansel and Gretel's house of horrors became your doorway to deliciousness...

by Matthew Stafford

"And if I had but one penny in the world, thou shouldst have it to buy gingerbread."—William Shakespeare, Love's Labours Lost

Once upon a time a couple of kids named Hansel and Gretel were wandering in the woods after their penniless parents deserted them and left them to fend for themselves. (This is one of those medieval German fairy tales that put the grim in Grimm.) After a hungry afternoon among the evergreens they came upon a house made entirely of gingerbread, the favored nosh of serf and noble alike, and after swallowing their astonishment they began to swallow the house. Unfortunately, a witch with a taste for tender young kinder had constructed the place for just such an opportunity, and...well, you know the rest. Suffice it to say that ginger, particularly in the form of gingerbread and especially in the form of the gingerbread house, has aroused hunger, delight, avarice and wonder for millennia.

The root itself, Zingiber officinale, is a native of tropical Asia and was cultivated early on for its hot, sweet flavor, its splendid preservative properties and as an aid to digestion. References to ginger-flavored honey cakes date back 4,000 years (a special cake etched with an image of the sun was popular around the winter solstice), and the spice was so plentiful in ancient Rome it was as heavily taxed as booze and cigarettes are today. After the fall of the Roman Empire, ginger more or less disappeared from European kitchens until the Crusaders and Marco Polo reintroduced the stuff to a sensation-hungry Continent on the cusp of the Renaissance. The reborn East-West spice trade paralleled a craze for ginger that found its fondest expression in baked goods. Paris hosted a gingerbread fair that lasted eight centuries. The gingerbread bakers of Prague, Paris and Nuremberg belonged to their own guilds and were the elite of their trade, with royal contracts, rigorous standards to uphold and special sleeping quarters separate from those other run-of-the-mill bakers. At first, ginger, sugar, rose water, ground almonds and breadcrumbs were pressed into molds bearing the likenesses of regents or religious figures, but eventually flour, butter, eggs and molasses helped gingerbread evolve into the lighter, lovelier treat we know today.

Gingerbread usually assumes two forms, a crisp little cookie like the ginger snap or the brandy snap, or the soft cake known in Germany as lebkuchen. (Other manifestations include Poland's dark, spicy piernik loaf and the intricately carved and molded gingerbread statuettes of Northern Europe, a precursor, perhaps, of the equally decorative and inedible gingerbread house. In the 15th century gingerbread was even used in lieu of paper as "reading boards" etched with the letters of the alphabet to help schoolchildren learn to read.) The cookie's best-known representative is the gingerbread man, invented by none other than Elizabeth I to serve as a sort of personalized edible at one of her state banquets. Gingerbread was no stranger to royal intrigue: It was frequently employed as a diplomatic peace offering among the European powers, and in 1487, Emperor Frederick III had his bakers produce 4,000 ginger snaps bearing his likeness and distributed them among the children of his subjects to improve his public profile.

Lebkuchen has been a German staple since the 15th century, when Nuremberg was known as "the gingerbread capital of the world" and the guild's bakers outdid themselves with intricate molds, wreaths, figurines, burnishes and other elaborate icings on the cake. The story of Hansel and Gretel dates back to about this time and was apocryphally based on an incident in which two children were sent to spy on an old baker and steal her top-secret gingerbread recipe. She caught them and locked them in the house (and fed them very well, it should be added) before villagers came and rescued the kids and killed and burned the baker for good measure. The H&G fairy tale, it is said, was cooked up as a positive spin on the whole ugly incident. In any case, the Brothers Grimm collected the story in their Children's and Household Tales of 1812, and before you can say "Tootsie Roll rain gutters," (scaled-down) gingerbread houses (aka knusperhaeuschen, or "houses for nibbling") were Germany's hottest commodity. Westbound emigrants (especially the Pennsylvania Dutch) brought the concept to the United States, where the gingerbread house has flourished in the years since as a beloved Yuletide decorative staple.

The gingerbread house is more structural than edible: Its walls are baked without leavening agents to ensure a strong support system. It can be as simple as a few graham crackers plastered on a milk carton with canned frosting, but it usually isn't. A thatched-roof cottage dripping with icing and gumdrops is always popular, but there's an entire community out there of gingerbread-house aficionados who've been planning their Victorian mansions, steepled churches and medieval castles since the Fourth of July. Simple or elaborate, there are patterns to assemble, adhesive frostings to cook up, candy windows to cut on the bias, and icicles, rebar, chimneys, ponds, fencing, porches, walkways, bushes, trees and snowmen to purchase or assemble. Some architects even go in for roller coasters, Ferris wheels, train stations and babbling brooks. Whimsy is an important aspect of any gingerbread house, so don't forget the Oreo cookie roofing, the nonpareil slate work, the Red Whips fence posts.

The biggest gingerbread house in human memory was created at Minnesota's Mall of America in 2006. Covering 1,496 square feet, it was constructed from 14,250 pounds of gingerbread, 4,750 pounds of icing, 100 pounds of Tootsie Rolls, 1,200 feet of Twizzlers, 1,800 Hershey bars and God knows what all. There's nothing along that scale around here, but if you head to the lobbies of the St. Francis, Palace and Fairmont hotels in San Francisco you'll find some mighty impressive examples of confectionary architecture. It's one of the more pleasant ways to celebrate the holiday season, gumdrops, molasses, zingiber and all.

You can catch gingerbread man Matt at mstafford@pacificsun.com.