What is the origin of gingerbread?

The pudgy gingerbread man with his candy eyes and icing smile has a sinister backstory—a link to death and the demonic. Over the centuries the gingerbread pendulum swings between dark and light. The sweet treat’s history made it perfect for Gingerdead Man, my contemporary Christmas mystery.

Precursors to gingerbread men played a role in the Saturnalia, the Roman winter solstice celebration. The decadent festivities included excessive drinking, eating, and carousing. Celebrants gobbled down man-shaped biscuits representing the culminating event of Saturnalia—human sacrifice as a gift to appease the gods. As Christianity spread through the Roman empire, religious leaders replaced Saturnalia with Christmas and cleaned up the festivities. Carousing became caroling and gift-giving recalled the Magi’s offerings to the baby Jesus.

Though the Romans used ginger for medicinal and culinary purposes, we don’t know if the spice was an ingredient in Saturnalia biscuits. After the Roman Empire fell, ginger all but disappeared from Europe. In the 13th century Marco Polo brought it to the West from China. In the centuries that followed, the spice spread across Europe and went from rare and expensive to widely available and cheap.

Gingerbread is a misnomer because it was never a bread. The word derives from the Old French gigembras for gingered food. It morphed into gyngebreed in Middle English and then into gingerbread. In the form of cookies or flat cakes, the sweet was used for nourishment, education, and decoration. Monks made gingerbread to feed the hungry and give religious instruction. They mixed a paste of breadcrumbs, honey, and ginger and rolled it out thin. They either baked it in sheets and cut it into cakes or pressed it into molds carved with images of saints or biblical scenes before baking.

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Children learned the alphabet from a gingerbread slab with letters inscribed on it. This was a cheaper version of the hornbook, a hand-held wooden paddle which paper with lessons was pasted. Once children learned a letter from a gingerbread hornbook, they were allowed to eat it. English poet and diplomat Matthew Prior celebrates this pedagogical method in verse:

A Horn Book gives of Ginger-Bread:

And that the Child may learn the Better,

As he can name, he eats the Letter;

Proceeding thus with Vast Delight,

He spells, and gnaws from Left to Right.

More elaborate gingerbread became common in royal courts. Heads of state used it for self-promotion, distributing sweets stamped with their own images like coins. Bakers, woodcarvers, and painters in Nuremberg created ornate gingerbread figures and edifices. An artist then embellished them icing and real gold flakes for their rich patrons. Nuremberg gingerbread bakers formed their own guild and monopolized the sweet. While guild members could make gingerbread all year round, others, even home bakers, had that privilege only on Christmas and Easter.

Queen Elizabeth I hired her own gingerbread baker to feed her craving for the sweet. She commanded the baker to make gingerbread men in the likenesses of visiting dignitaries and her suitors. History doesn’t record if a suitor who’d fallen out of favor got no gingerbread or if the queen consumed his gingerbread likeness as a public brush-off. There were far worse fates than watching the queen decapitate your gingerbread effigy, given that displeasing a Tudor monarch could result in losing your real head.

The common people enjoyed less lavish forms of gingerbread, buying it at fairs and exchanging it as a love token. Many believed gingerbread in certain shapes was charmed. Those searching for mates or hoping to ward off evil devoured heart-shaped pieces. Gingerbread rabbits were supposed to increase fertility. Young unmarried women ate man-shaped gingerbread figures called “husbands” in hopes of attracting a live husband.

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The flip side of believing an object will confer good fortune is fearing it will bring bad luck. Superstitions sprang up that humanoid sweets had demonic powers. Within a few years of Queen Elizabeth’s death, the gingerbread pendulum had swung to the dark side. The sweet fell so far out of favor that Dutch magistrates declared it illegal to bake or eat the molded cookies.

Witches supposedly made gingerbread figures, ate them, and thereby caused the death of their enemies. Even after the persecution of witches ended in the 18th century, the evil witch persisted in oral traditions. The Brothers Grimm drew on folklore for their tale of a cannibalistic witch luring children into a gingerbread house. To save themselves, Hansel and Gretel push her into the oven where she planned to bake them. A grim tale indeed.

Ironically, the publication the Grimms’ tales gave the gingerbread pendulum a push back into the light by reviving the tradition of candy-studded gingerbread houses. Christmas assumed greater importance around the same time. It became a holiday in England and in many U.S. states only in the first half of the 19th century. Until then it was an ordinary workday, as it is to Scrooge in the Charles Dickens classic, A Christmas Carol. With the help of visiting ghosts, Scrooge experiences the holiday joys of gift-giving and food, family, and friends.

Queen Victoria popularized dormant English Christmas traditions and imported German ones from her husband’s homeland, including the evergreen tree hung with ornaments and sweets. Rescued from disrepute, human-shaped gingerbread sweets became holiday icons. Two centuries later, we still hang iced and decorated gingerbread men on Christmas trees and put them on our cookie platters.

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But the association of gingerbread men and death persists in a Halloween treat known as a gingerdead man, which has skeleton bones traced in white icing. This version of the sweet is central to my seventh Five-Ingredient Mystery featuring café manager Val Deniston and her live-wire grandfather. The story begins during the Dickens of a Holiday festival in Bayport, Maryland. While Val caters English tea parties, Granddad wears Victorian garb and, playing the role of Scrooge, greets festival visitors with “Bah. Humbug.”

As the festival winds down, Val caters a tea party for the costumed volunteers: Santa and Mrs. Claus, Scrooge, and other Dickens characters. An unexpected guest crashes the party, shrouded in a black garment like the eeriest ghost in A Christmas Carol. Face hidden, the ghost distributes gift bags to each volunteer. When Santa opens his bag, he finds a gingerdead man in it. The others recoil from the creepy cookie, but the man in red laughs heartily, devours it, and keels over.

The gingerbread pendulum has swung to the dark side for Santa. His death puts a damper on the town’s celebration. Preventing the cookie-cutter killer from baking more deadly treats is the only way to take the curse off gingerbread and restore the holiday spirit.

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Tis the season to be gingerbread! The sweet-and-spicy treat flavored by a lumpy little root is a ubiquitous celebrity in fall and winter, starring in everything from cute cookies and overpriced lattes to edible construction projects. You can even buy gingerbread-scented mascara or dog shampoo, if you really can't get enough of the stuff.

As I bit the head off a gingerbread man the other day, I wondered: Whose bright idea was this delicious concoction, anyway?

Fueled by a piece of Starbucks gingerbread loaf (which proved rather disappointing), I followed a trail of crumbs (okay, just a helpful librarian) to "The Gingerbread Book." According to sugarcraft scholar Steven Stellingwerf (I want his job!), gingerbread may have been introduced to Western Europe by 11th-century crusaders returning from the eastern Mediterranean. Its precise origin is murky, although it is clear that ginger itself originates in Asia.

Gingerbread was a favorite treat at festivals and fairs in medieval Europe—often shaped and decorated to look like flowers, birds, animals or even armor—and several cities in France and England hosted regular "gingerbread fairs" for centuries. Ladies often gave their favorite knights a piece of gingerbread for good luck in a tournament, or superstitiously ate a "gingerbread husband" to improve their chances of landing the real thing.

By 1598, it was popular enough to merit a mention in a Shakespeare play ("An I had but one penny in the world, thou shouldst have it to buy ginger-bread..."). Some even considered it medicine: 16th-century writer John Baret described gingerbread as "A Kinde of cake or paste made to comfort the stomacke."

Stellingwerf notes that the meaning of the word "gingerbread" has been reshaped over the centuries. In medieval England, it referred to any kind of preserved ginger (borrowing from the Old French term gingebras, which in turn came from the spice's Latin name, zingebar.) The term became associated with ginger-flavored cakes sometime in the 15th century.

In Germany, gingerbread cookies called Lebkuchen have long been a fixture at street festivals, often in the shape of hearts frosted with sugary messages like "Alles was ich brauch bist du" (All I need is you) or "Du bist einfach super" (You're really super). As far as I can tell, Germans also invented the concept of making gingerbread houses, probably inspired by the witch's candy cottage in the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel.

North Americans have been baking gingerbread for more than 200 years—even George Washington's mother gets credit for one recipe—in shapes that ranged from miniature kings (pre-revolution) to eagles (after independence).

These days, as The New Food Lover's Companion (a lovely early Christmas present from my inlaws-to-be) explains it, "gingerbread generally refers to one of two desserts. It can be a dense, ginger-spiced cookie flavored with molasses or honey and cut into fanciful shapes (such as the popular gingerbread man). Or, particularly in the United States, it can describe a dark, moist cake flavored with molasses, ginger and other spices."

Of course, when gingerbread cookies are shaped like everything from popular politicians to baby animals, polite consumption can be tricky. Is it barbaric to bite off the head first? Or worse to start by amputating an extremity? If you nibble on decorations first, does the plaintive voice of that character from Shrek echo in your imagination ("Not my gumdrop buttons! ") ?