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Bread, Brown, Biscuits
Take two ounces of butter dissolved in half a pint of boiling water, and stir it into a pound of wheat meal; knead it to a firm dough. Mix all well, roll out to a thickness of about half an inch, and cut with a biscuit-cutter or a sharp-edged tea-cup. Prick the biscuits with a fork, and bake in a quick oven. Average cost, 4d. Sufficient for one pound of biscuits.
A plain wholemeal cracker made with nothing but flour, butter and water. The whole outcome depends on working the dough while the water is still hot and rolling it thin.
- Wheat mealThis is stoneground wholemeal (whole wheat) flour, coarser than modern supermarket wholemeal but close enough. A pound is about 3 1/2 cups; it will drink the liquid greedily, so add the last of the water gradually.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, a scant 1 1/4 US cups. If you measure by American pints you will be an ounce and a half short and the dough will not come together.
- Work it hotThe butter is melted into boiling water and the whole lot stirred straight into the flour. Scalding the meal this way softens the bran and gives a short, crisp biscuit rather than a leathery one, so mix and knead as soon as the dough can be handled.
- A quick ovenRoughly 400-450F (200-230C). At that heat half-inch rounds take roughly 12-15 minutes; pull them when the edges are set and lightly browned.
- Prick with a forkNot decoration. Docking lets steam escape so the biscuits stay flat and bake through evenly instead of puffing and going soft in the middle.
- Half an inch is thickFor a genuinely crisp biscuit roll nearer a quarter inch. At the full half inch you get something closer to a hard scone.
- CrispingThey firm as they cool, so judge nothing straight from the oven. Cool on a rack; any trapped steam underneath will soften the base.
- Yield and costAbout a pound of baked biscuits, roughly 20 rounds from a 2 1/2-inch cutter. The 4d costing is a period market price and has no modern equivalent.
Cassell's places this among the plain wholemeal bakes that Victorian household writers promoted in the second half of the nineteenth century, when brown bread and brown biscuits were recommended as wholesome alternatives to very white, finely bolted flour. "Biscuit" here carries its older English sense of a hard, dry, twice-baked keeping-cake rather than anything sweet, and the recipe's minimal formula -- meal, butter, boiling water, no sugar, no raising agent -- puts it close to the wholemeal digestive and water biscuits sold by commercial bakers of the period. The costing in pence, given alongside the yield, is typical of Cassell's approach: the book was written for households budgeting closely, and most entries carry a cost as well as a method.