Home › The Principles of Cookery › Breakfast Biscuits
Breakfast Biscuits
Mix flour with cream to a proper consistency, and salt to taste. One pound of flour to a quarter of a pint of thin cream will make a paste sufficiently stiff. Form into small biscuits, prick them, and bake in a hot oven for fifteen or twenty minutes. Probable cost, about 6d. Or, mix flour as stated with a small bit of butter, the size of a pigeon's egg, and moisten with a quarter of a pint of cold water; add a little salt, and bake in a hot oven for fifteen minutes. Probable cost, about 4d.
Two versions of a plain unsweetened breakfast biscuit — closer to a water biscuit or cream cracker than anything sweet. The whole success of them lies in how thin you roll the dough and how hot the oven is.
- Roll them thinThe recipe says only to form small biscuits and prick them, but with no leavening in either version thinness is what decides between crisp and merely hard. Something around 1/8 inch (3 mm) works, and dock them all over with a fork, as directed, so they stay flat instead of blistering.
- A quarter of a pintAn imperial quarter-pint is 5 fl oz, about 140 ml or a scant two-thirds of a US cup. Against 1 lb (450 g) of flour that gives a very dry mass -- the book calls it a paste "sufficiently stiff" -- so expect to compress it under the rolling pin rather than knead it, and add water a teaspoon at a time only if it will not hold together at all.
- "A hot oven"Read this as 425-450F (220-230C). Fifteen to twenty minutes at that heat will colour them lightly and dry them through; pull them when the surface is pale gold and the edges just brown.
- A pigeon's egg of butterAbout 1/2 oz, or 15 g -- roughly a tablespoon. Victorian books commonly gave small quantities of fat by comparison with nuts and eggs rather than by weight.
- Thin creamSingle cream (about 18% fat) or American light cream. Modern heavy cream is far richer than what is meant here and will make a shorter, more crumbly biscuit; thin it with a little milk if that is all you have.
- Salt"To taste" in an uncooked dry dough is hard to judge. Roughly a teaspoon of fine salt per pound of flour suits these; without it they taste of nothing.
- CoolingCrispness arrives as they cool, not in the oven. Move them to a rack immediately and let them go completely cold before storing in a tin, or trapped steam will soften them.
- YieldThe "probable cost" of 4d to 6d is a Victorian household-budget note and has no modern equivalent.
In British usage the standard biscuit is sweet, which is precisely why unsweetened examples like this one are distinguished as water biscuits or crackers. It is often said to descend from the plain flour-and-water baked goods that fed ships and armies, refined for the breakfast table by the addition of cream or a little butter. Cassell's gives two versions with their prices attached because the book was written for households where the difference between 6d and 4d mattered, and the cheaper water-and-butter version does the same job for a third less. Commercially, the same idea was being sold in the period as the water biscuit and the Bath Oliver, both eaten with butter, cheese or preserves; the American beaten biscuit, worked with a mallet rather than a rolling pin, is sometimes seen as a parallel solution to the same problem of making a dry dough tender without yeast or chemical leavening.