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Dessert Biscuits
1 cupful confectioners' sugar 1 cupful Crisco 1 cupful flour 5 whites of eggs 1/2 teaspoonful vanilla extract 1 teaspoonful salt Cream Crisco and gradually add sugar, mix thoroughly, and incorporate, one by one, whites of eggs. Now add flour, salt, and vanilla. Mix well then place in small, long heaps o a Criscoed tin. Bake in cool oven to pale brown color. Sufficient for sixty biscuits.
A plain shortening-and-egg-white batter that bakes into thin, crisp fingers in the langue de chat family. Two things decide the outcome: a genuinely low oven and small, well-spaced heaps.
- "Cool oven"Period tables put a cool or slow oven somewhere in the region of 250-300F. These are meant to dry out and colour only at the edges; a hotter oven risks browning them before the centres set.
- CriscoCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, still sold, and the book is a promotional volume for it. Modern Crisco is reformulated (no partially hydrogenated oil) but behaves the same here. Butter can be substituted cup for cup, though the batter will spread more and taste less neutral.
- "Biscuits"Not the American quick bread. These are cookies in the British sense.
- The saltA full teaspoon in a batter this small is assertive by current taste, and period Crisco was unsalted. Half a teaspoon suits most palates, less if you use salted butter.
- Cup measuresRoughly: confectioners' sugar 120 g, shortening 205 g, flour 125 g. Five egg whites are about 150 g. The batter is loose and pipeable rather than a dough.
- Shaping"Small, long heaps" means piped fingers about two inches long. A plain half-inch tube is easiest. They spread, so leave two inches between them.
- The tin"A Criscoed tin" is a greased flat baking sheet. Parchment is better - these are fragile hot and lift cleanly once they have firmed for a minute.
- YieldSixty is accurate if the fingers are genuinely small. Cool them flat, or drape them over a rolling pin while warm for the curved tuile shape.
This comes from one of the cookbooks Procter & Gamble commissioned to persuade American cooks to use Crisco, introduced in 1911 as a substitute for lard and butter; the recipes call for the product by name, down to the greased pan being "Criscoed." The biscuit itself is older than the shortening: a batter of equal parts fat, sugar and flour bound with egg whites and piped into fingers is the standard formula for langues de chat and the sponge-finger family, generally traced to French pastry practice and long established in English confectionery books before this one. What is new here is the fat. Substituting a shelf-stable vegetable shortening into a classic butter batter was exactly the argument the company wanted to make, and a delicate tea biscuit made the case better than a pie crust would have.