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Thin Biscuits, or Notions
Take one pint of flour, and make into dough as soft as can be rolled, with sweet milk, a saltspoonful of salt, and two ounces of butter. Roll into large, round cakes, and of wafer-like thickness. Stick well with a fork. In baking do not allow them to brown, but remove from the oven while they retain their whiteness, yet are crisp, and will melt in the mouth.
A plain flour-and-butter cracker with no leavening at all — the crispness comes entirely from rolling thin and baking pale. Two things decide whether it works: thickness and colour.
- Roll thinner than feels sensible"Wafer-like" suggests something in the region of 1/16 inch. Anything thicker bakes into a hard, dense biscuit rather than something that shatters.
- A pint of flourMeasured by volume, roughly 2 cups, or about 8-9 oz by weight. Dry goods were commonly measured in liquid measures in this period.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. That is modest for this quantity of flour; a half teaspoon suits most modern palates, particularly if using unsalted butter.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh whole milk, as opposed to the soured or buttermilk that appears in leavened recipes elsewhere in these books. Since there is no soda here, no acid is wanted. Expect to need something in the region of 1/3 to 1/2 cup, added gradually — "as soft as can be rolled" is the only guide the recipe gives, and flours vary.
- Two ounces of butterFour tablespoons, or half a stick. Rub it into the flour before adding milk, as for pastry.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven heat; something around a moderate 350F suits. Higher and the surface colours before the interior dries out, which is precisely what the recipe warns against. Bake on the middle rack and turn the sheet once.
- Pale, not brownThe instruction to remove them while still white is the hinge of the recipe. They should feel dry and sound hollow when tapped, with at most a faint cream tint at the edges — 10 to 14 minutes depending on thickness. They crisp further as they cool, so judge by colour and dryness, not by snap in the pan.
- DockingPricking well with a fork stops the layers lifting into blisters. Go right through the dough, and be generous with the holes.
- Yield and keepingSeveral dozen small crackers if cut to about 3 inches, or fewer large rounds as the recipe describes, broken after baking. Store airtight; if they soften, five minutes in a low oven restores them.
"Biscuit" in a book of this vintage rarely means the soft leavened American breakfast biscuit — here it carries the older sense of a hard, twice-baked or crisp flat bread, closer to what a modern reader would call a cracker or water biscuit. Wafers of this kind turn up in nineteenth-century books under names like beaten biscuit and cream crackers, depending on the household and the region. What unites them is the absence of yeast or chemical leavening: structure comes from gluten worked up by rolling, and lightness from steam alone, a technique generally traced back to ship's biscuit and other keeping breads made before reliable leaveners were cheap. Recipes of this kind were bread, made when the oven was already hot and eaten with cheese, soup, or at tea.