And mede eek in a maselyn,
And roial spicerye
Of ginge breed that was full fyn."
Shakespeare also must have valued this bread very highly, for in the play, "Love's Labor Lost," he says:
"An I had but one penny in the world thou shouldst have it to buy ginger-bread."
Ginger-bread is often made into fanciful shapes. Cats, dogs, horses, elephants and men are cut out of the rolled dough and then baked. Many of my readers are perhaps familiar with some of the beautiful playtime songs of Alice Riley and Jessie Gaynor. The following are the words of one of these songs, entitled, "The Ginger-bread Man." It describes the ginger-bread man very beautifully in the first verse. His awful fate, evidently in the hands of a small cannibal, is very graphically described in the second verse. I regret being wholly unable to supply the music. Here are the words by Alice Riley:
"Oh the ginger-bread man, the ginger-bread man,
The round little, brown little ginger-bread man,
He has sugary eyes and a sugary nose,
And he's sweet from his crown to his sugary toes,