Sift 1 pound of flour; beat the yolks of 4 eggs with 1 pound of sugar; add ½ ounce cinnamon, ½ ounce of ginger, ¼ teaspoonful of cloves, some grated lemon peel and a pinch of salt. Make all into a dough and roll into small cakes about an inch in diameter. Put on well-buttered baking-plates, sprinkled with flour, and bake in a moderate oven until a rich brown. Serve with wine.
A hard, sugar-heavy spice biscuit of the pfeffernüsse family, written for a cook who already knew what the dough should feel like. Two things need attention before you start: the liquid and the spice load.
- The dough will not come together as writtenOne pound of flour and one pound of sugar bound only by four egg yolks is far too dry to knead. Comparable spice-biscuit doughs generally carry more egg, whether whole eggs or extra yolks, and some are warmed with the sugar first; expect to add eggs or a little water until the mass is stiff but pliable. Nothing here fails safely if you guess wrong, it simply crumbles.
- Half an ounce of spice is a great dealHalf an ounce of ground cinnamon is roughly 2 tablespoons, and half an ounce of ginger about 2½. That is aggressive even by spice-biscuit standards. Halving both gives something closer to modern palates without losing the character.
- Moderate oven350F (175C). These are small and mostly sugar, so watch from 10 minutes; "a rich brown" arrives quickly and the difference between brown and burnt is a minute or two.
- Buttered and floured platesThe baking-plate is a flat sheet. Butter plus a dusting of flour was the standard release; parchment does the same job and prevents the sugar-heavy bases from catching.
- "Roll into small cakes about an inch"Ambiguous in the original. Either roll the dough out and cut inch rounds, or pinch off pieces and roll them into inch balls. Balls give the dense, domed biscuit this dough wants; flattened rounds bake more evenly.
- No leaveningThere is no soda, no ammonium carbonate, no baking powder. These are meant to be hard and keeping biscuits, not soft ones, and they improve after a few days in a tin.
- YieldUnstated, but two pounds of dough at an inch a piece runs to 70-90 small cakes. Halve the recipe unless you are baking for a crowd or for keeping.
- Serve with wineThe original says no more than that. A sweet or fortified wine is the likely intention, and a hard biscuit of this kind takes well to being dipped, but the choice is the cook's.
Hard, honey- or sugar-sweetened spice biscuits stiff with cinnamon, ginger and cloves run right across Central Europe — Hungarian mézeskálács, German pfeffernüsse and lebkuchen, Czech perník — and are usually associated with the honey-cake and gingerbread bakers' guilds of the late medieval and early modern German and Bohemian towns. The type is a keeping biscuit: very little fat, a lot of sugar, no leavening, so it hardens rather than staling and was baked in quantity for Christmas and New Year.