Build a spicy La. memory with colorful stage planks

Today, commercially baked stage planks can be found at a few supermarkets.  Acadian Bakery in Lafayette sells ginger cakes both iced and uniced. Then there’s the town of Jeanerette’s LeJeune Bakery, which has been baking and selling the specialty since 1884.

Editor’s note: Cynthia Nobles, a member of the Newcomb College Culinary History Writers Group, takes a look at Louisiana heritage foods, beginning with the gingerbread slabs known as stage planks. She is the author of LSU Press’s forthcoming title “The Delta Queen Cookbook.”

Remember enjoying Jack’s Rock’n Roll cookies in the ’60s? Back then, most Louisiana grocery stores and filling stations sold the playing card-sized ginger cakes. Iced either pink or white, two stage planks would be wrapped in a waxed paper bag and sold for the outrageous price of a nickel.

This nostalgic cookie was a commercial take on the stage plank, a stiff slab of gingerbread also commonly known as “Louisiana gingerbread,” “Creole tiles” and “mule bellies.” The spicy treat is named for the steamboat gangplank, or stage plank, the movable walkway connecting a boat to the shore.

Although recipes for firm ginger cakes and hard gingerbreads can be found in early American cookbooks, stage planks are strongly associated with 19th-century New Orleans and its molasses trade. Molasses is the thick, dark, uncrystallized byproduct of sugar refining, and in the 19th century it was not nearly as costly as refined sugar. Since pre-Civil War New Orleans was the world’s largest sugar refiner, locals had access to lots of cheap molasses, and the sweet syrupy liquid became a food staple for both animals and slaves.

The recipe for a form of stage planks likely filtered down to slave cooks from Europeans, who had been baking gingerbreads for hundreds of years with honey or treacle, the English version of molasses. No one is sure how the stage plank received its rectangular form. But it is certain that in the 19th century, Creoles of color sold stage planks in the streets of New Orleans. According to the 1901 edition of the “Picayune Creole Cook Book,” these peddlers gave their ginger cakes the name Stage Planks.

Today, commercially baked stage planks can be found at a few supermarkets. For something fresher, Acadian Bakery in Lafayette sells ginger cakes both iced and uniced.

Then there’s the town of Jeanerette’s LeJeune Bakery, which does not ice its stage planks. The business has been baking and selling the specialty since 1884.

Stage planks are simple to make and their firm texture makes them ideal for packing in school lunch boxes, sending out to the duck camp, and for mailing overseas.

The cookie’s large size also provides a generous palette for decorating according to season and event. Think purple, green and gold for Mardi Gras — stage planks will add a historic New Orleans touch to a buffet table, and will encourage everyone to party like it’s 1960.