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Biscuits, Plain
Make one pound of flour into a stiff paste with the yolk of an egg well beaten in a little milk. Too much milk will make the biscuits thin and heavy. Beat the paste and knead till smooth. Roll out thin, and with a round tin-cutter form into biscuits. Bake in a slow oven. Time, twelve to eighteen minutes. Probable cost, 4d. per pound.
This is a hard, unsweetened British biscuit of the cracker family — the sort eaten with cheese or butter, not a cookie. Almost everything depends on working the dough hard and baking it low enough to dry rather than colour.
- The hinge: beat the pasteThe instruction to beat and knead until smooth is not decorative. Repeated beating with a rolling pin, folding and beating again develops gluten and creates the layered, blistered break that separates a good plain biscuit from a slab of baked flour paste. Ten minutes of this is not too much.
- Slow ovenThe book gives no temperatures; 'slow' in a work of this date is generally taken as somewhere around 300-325F/150-170C. The biscuits should dry through and take only the faintest colour; a hotter oven browns the surface before the centre has dried and leaves them soft in the middle by the next day.
- The milk is deliberately vagueThe original gives no quantity and warns against too much for good reason. Start with about 4 fl oz (120 ml) to 1 lb (450 g) flour plus one yolk, and add it a spoonful at a time; the dough should be genuinely stiff, harder than a pastry dough, and only just holding together.
- FlourA plain (all-purpose) flour is what is meant. A strong bread flour will give a tougher, more cracker-like snap if that suits you, but it will need slightly more liquid.
- SaltNone is listed. About half a teaspoon per pound of flour makes them far better on their own.
- Roll thin and dockThin means about 1/8 in (3 mm) or less. Prick each round several times with a fork before baking, or steam trapped inside will puff them into hollow domes.
- Yield and keepingA pound of flour gives several dozen biscuits from a 2 1/2 in cutter. Cool them completely on a rack and store airtight; if they soften after a few days, five minutes in a low oven crisps them again.
- The cost note"4d. per pound" is fourpence in pre-decimal currency, a housekeeping figure of the book's own day and of no use as a price now.
Plain biscuits sit at the sober end of a family that runs from ship's biscuit through captain's biscuits and water biscuits to the cream crackers of the later nineteenth century — flour, a little liquid, no sugar, and long dry baking so they would keep. The recipe teaches a principle: that a stiff, well-beaten paste and a cool oven produce a dry, crisp article, while a wet dough and a hot oven produce a thin, heavy one. By the time this dictionary appeared, factory biscuit-making in Britain was already a substantial industry, and firms in Reading and London were selling unsweetened biscuits of this sort in tins; a recipe like this one was for households that still preferred, or needed, to bake their own for the cheese course.