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Arrowroot Biscuits
Beat a quarter of a pound of butter to a cream: add gradually three well-beaten eggs, a quarter of a pound of flour, a quarter of a pound of sifted sugar, and three ounces of arrowroot, pounded to crush the lumps. Mix all smoothly together. Have ready a well-oiled tin, and drop from a spoon in pieces about the size of a florin. Bake in a slow oven. Time to bake, a quarter of an hour. Sufficient for two dozen biscuits. Probable cost. 10d.
A plain drop biscuit in the English sense — a small, crisp, short-textured cookie rather than a scone. The arrowroot is what makes it: it lightens the crumb and gives the short, sandy snap that plain flour alone will not.
- Weights in modern termsA quarter-pound each of butter, flour and sugar is 4 oz (115 g) apiece; three ounces of arrowroot is about 85 g. With 7 oz of flour and arrowroot together against three eggs, the mixture is a soft batter stiff enough to drop from a spoon, as the recipe directs, rather than a rollable dough.
- A slow ovenRoughly 275-325F (140-160C). At that heat the fifteen minutes given will set and barely colour the biscuits; they crisp as they cool. If they are still soft in the centre at the edge of that time, leave them a few minutes longer rather than raising the heat, which will brown the sugar before the middle dries.
- The size of a florinA florin was a two-shilling coin, roughly 28 mm — a little over an inch across. Drop teaspoonfuls and leave a good two inches between them, since a batter this wet spreads considerably.
- ArrowrootSold as arrowroot starch or arrowroot powder, and still widely available. The recipe's direction to pound it reflects a starch that caked into lumps in storage; the modern product is a fine free-flowing powder, so sifting it with the flour is enough.
- Creaming orderThe butter is creamed alone and the sugar goes in with the dry ingredients, which is not modern practice. Creaming butter and sugar together first will give more lift and a lighter biscuit if you prefer that; keeping to the original gives a denser, shorter one.
- The tin"Well-oiled tin" means a greased flat baking sheet. Parchment is easier — these are fragile while warm and tear if lifted too soon. Let them firm on the sheet for a minute or two before moving them to a rack.
- YieldTwo dozen, as stated, if you keep to the florin size. The 10d costing is a Victorian retail estimate and has no bearing on anything now.
Arrowroot — the starch washed from the rhizome of Maranta arundinacea, imported chiefly from St Vincent and the wider West Indies — occupied an odd place in the Victorian larder, half grocery and half pharmacy. It was the standard thickener for invalid cookery: arrowroot gruel, arrowroot jelly and arrowroot pudding fill the sickroom chapters of nineteenth-century household manuals, on the reasoning that it was bland, easily digested and free of the gluten and bran that were thought to trouble weak stomachs. Biscuits like these carried that reputation into the biscuit tin, and the association held long enough that arrowroot biscuits were still being sold as a teething and nursery biscuit well into the twentieth century. The pedigree is visible in the plainness: butter, sugar, flour, egg and starch, with no spice, no fruit and no flavouring at all.