Gingerbread is a timeless winter delight

Spicy gingerbread is a classic with many variations. Novelist Laurie Colwin's version uses Steen's syrup and lemon brandy. (food styling/karoline boehm goodnick; Essdras M Suarez/Globe Staff)

A chill blast from the northeast drives me into the kitchen on a recent day. Time to change gears, reach for the heavy soup pots, put music on, and cook, one of the best ways I know to push back against the dark.

It's definitely a gingerbread day. I need to fill the house with its pungent fragrance and promise of pleasure. I turn on the oven, find the molasses on the pantry shelf, and reach for my overflowing recipe file.

I've used this manila file folder for 30 years. Here are recipes from friends and students, favorites from my mother, grandmother, great-grandmother - each written by hand. Gingerbread is a favorite treat, and I've collected many. I notice Laurie Colwin's recipe scrawled in pencil.

I am a big fan of novelist Laurie Colwin and was devoted to her column in Gourmet magazine. She wrote about love, domestic life, family, and marriage like another favorite author, Jane Austen. Her prose was personal, informal, and cozy, her food writing funny and unpretentious. It was easy to picture her at home in flannel pajamas eating on her lap. When she died of heart complications suddenly in 1992 at age 48, I felt I'd lost a personal friend.

This gingerbread recipe is from "Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen," which is a memoir-cookbook that came out in 1988. At the time I was known for mishaps at the stove. No one could forget the time Richard cut himself on my meatloaf (the knife glanced off the overly crusty top) or the no-fail cheese pie that, yes, didn't work for me. My sister cracked a tooth on my pecan loaf. And so on. I stopped trying.

But this day, turning to the gingerbread, it's in different hands. Perhaps because I found Colwin, and through her, some confidence. These hands are now seasoned by cutting, peeling, paring. In "Home Cooking" there are lots of recipes for chicken, pot roast, and stews. Colwin devotes a whole chapter to gingerbread. "Its spicy embracing taste is the perfect thing for a winter afternoon," she writes. I set the oven, dash to the store for buttermilk, and I'm back before the oven beeps that it's ready.

I cream butter with light brown sugar. Colwin says light brown makes a spongier cake, dark brown a more sugary crust. Light brown is what I have so I'm going for spongier.

Next I add the molasses. Oops. She recommends Steen's. This is cane syrup made in south Louisiana and available by mail. I have ordinary molasses, which I use, but a peek online later tells me Steen's is still available (steensyrup.com).

I beat in eggs and then flour and spices. Colwin calls for a heaping tablespoon of ground ginger, and lesser amounts of cinnamon, allspice, and cloves.

The next ingredient is a lemon brandy Colwin makes by peeling lemons, mashing the rind, and steeping it in brandy. She says it's all right to substitute vanilla extract. I pour the batter into the pan and put it in the oven.

Colwin made this cake every year for her own birthday and based the recipe on one in "Charleston Receipts," an old collection that was one of the only cookbooks my mother owned. I can picture its green spiral binding on her kitchen shelf. I go back online and amazingly, it's still in print (jlcharleston.org).

Colwin writes to "broom test" the cake after 20 minutes. That means testing for doneness the way women did a century ago. You take a straw from a broom and, using the clean end, gently poke the cake and see if the straw comes out clean. I know the broom test because that was how my mother taught me and I still do it. I find this comforting. Good advice, too. After 25 minutes the gingerbread is ready.

Although gingerbread is supposed to improve with age, this one won't have the chance to. Most of it will be eaten before it has time to cool.

I put the recipe back into the folder. Next time, I'll have Steen's syrup in the pantry, maybe even homemade lemon brandy. I might try the chocolate or lemon icing.

There are other tempting recipes in this memoir, and there are many winter nights ahead.

Laura Wainwright, a former children's librarian, lives in West Tisbury.