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Biscuits, Hard
Warm half a pound of butter in as much skimmed milk as will make four pounds of flour into a very stiff paste. Beat it with a rolling-pin, and work it until it becomes perfectly smooth. Roll it very thin, and cut into biscuits with a tin shape or a large cup. Prick them freely with a fork, and bake for six or eight minutes in a moderate oven.
A plain hard biscuit of the ship's-biscuit family: flour, a little fat, milk, no leavening and no sugar. The whole character of it comes from the beating, so start there.
- The hinge is the beatingWorking the stiff paste with a rolling pin is not a shortcut for kneading; it is what develops the gluten to give the dense, snapping texture these biscuits are meant to have. Fold the slab, beat it flat, fold again, and keep going until the surface is glossy and smooth, as the recipe asks — this will take a good while. A stand mixer with a dough hook on low will do it, but the dough is very dry and will strain a light machine.
- Scale it downFour pounds of flour is a household baking day, not a batch — many dozens of biscuits, depending on the size of the cutter. A quarter of the recipe (1 lb flour, 2 oz butter) is a sensible modern quantity and still fills two sheets.
- The milk is unmeasured, deliberatelyThe milk is unmeasured -- The original gives no quantity, so add the warmed milk gradually until the mass just coheres. Expect roughly 1 cup of liquid per pound of flour, possibly less. The paste should be markedly stiffer than pastry — barely tacky, hard to squeeze together.
- Skimmed milkThen simply the milk left after the cream had been skimmed off, rather than a health choice. Ordinary skim milk is the direct equivalent; whole milk gives a slightly softer, shorter biscuit, which is not what is wanted here.
- Moderate ovenThe original gives no temperature; around 350F/175C is the usual modern reading of "moderate". At six to eight minutes the biscuits should be dry and only faintly coloured at the edges — they crisp as they cool, not in the oven.
- Roll thinner than feels right"Very thin" is best read as about 1/8 inch or 3 mm. Any thicker and the short bake leaves a soft, doughy centre that will go stale rather than crisp.
- Prick them freelyDocking lets steam escape so the biscuits stay flat instead of blistering into hollow pillows. Go right through to the sheet, and do it generously — a dozen holes per biscuit is not excessive.
- Cooling and keepingCool on a rack until completely cold, then store airtight. Properly dried they keep for weeks; if they soften, five minutes in a low oven restores the snap.
Hard biscuits sit at the austere end of the baking chapter in Victorian cookery books, close kin to ship's biscuit and the plain "water biscuit" sold by the pound at the grocer's. The word biscuit itself comes, through Old French, from the Latin for twice-cooked, a reminder that the object was originally dryness and keeping quality rather than richness — flour and liquid with just enough fat to stop the crumb being brutal, and no sugar or leavening at all. It is among the plainest things in the baking chapter: biscuits of this kind were eaten with cheese and butter and kept well in a tin, and the four-pound quantity suits a household baking day. The instruction to beat the paste with a rolling pin, rather than knead it, is a practical answer to a dough too stiff to handle any other way.