Recipe: Pfefferkuchen
Pfefferkuchen literally means pepper cake. However, not only is there no actual pepper in this recipe, it's not even cake. It's more like gingerbread cookies or gingersnaps. So, why is it called pepper cake? Well, this recipe is very old. And by very old, I mean very, very old. This recipe came about at a time before spices were generally used in any recipes, let alone cake or cookie recipes. When spices of any kind, including ginger or cinnamon, were finally available for use in sweet recipes, they were all called pepper. They just used pepper to mean spice. So, that's why pepper is in the name. (I should also say that there are a very large amount of variations of the recipe because of the age of the recipe.) The reason it's called cake even though it's actually cookies is because there was a time when all sweet things were called cake in German. After all, we also call it gingerbread, even though it has nothing in common with bread. So, now that we're over ...