Ingredients Room

Honey, flour and spices are the starting ingredients of the gingerbread baker's work. The ingredients room explores where they come from, what they look like and how they smell. Visitors discover spices through their senses, while beekeeping tools illustrate the work required before honey could be added to dough. A separate subject is forest beekeeping: gathering honey from bees living in tree cavities. This is a very different setting from a factory hall filled with finished products.

The story of flour introduces quern stones, used to grind grain. Next comes resting the dough: the prepared mixture did not always go straight into the oven, but underwent a period of maturation. The room brings together three stages of the craft: obtaining ingredients, preparing dough and waiting before baking.

Toruń's gingerbread tradition dates back to the 14th century, but the oldest known recipe for Toruń gingerbread comes from 1725. It appeared in “Compendium medicum auctum”, a medical work. The recipe begins with honey and is among the surviving records that help reconstruct historical dough-making methods. The age of the baking tradition and that of the surviving recipe are therefore different: the tradition predates this written instruction.