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Captain's Biscuits
Put a pinch of salt with as much flour as may be required, and make it into a paste with a little new milk. Knead it thoroughly till it is firm and stiff, then divide it into balls, and form into cakes about a quarter of an inch in thickness. Prick them with a fork, and bake for about fifteen minutes.
A two-ingredient unleavened biscuit that depends entirely on how hard you work the dough and how hot the oven is. The original gives no quantities, no temperature and no yield, so all three need filling in.
- ProportionsWork to about 2 cups (250 g) flour and a scant 1/2 teaspoon salt, adding the milk a spoonful at a time until the flour comes together as a stiff paste; expect to need somewhere in the region of 1/2 cup (120 ml). The dough should be firm and barely tacky, closer to pasta dough than to scone dough; too much milk gives a biscuit that stays soft and leathery.
- "New milk"Fresh whole milk, straight from the cow and unsoured, as distinct from the skimmed or turned milk kept for other uses. Ordinary whole milk is the equivalent.
- The kneading is the recipeThere is no leavening and no fat, so the only thing developing structure is gluten. Knead a full 10 minutes, or fold and roll the dough repeatedly, which is how commercial biscuit dough was "broken". Under-kneaded dough bakes to a dense, chalky slab rather than a crisp one.
- Oven heatCassell's leaves the temperature to the cook. Fifteen minutes for a quarter-inch biscuit implies a hot oven: 425F (220C) will colour and dry them in that time. At a lower heat they need 20-25 minutes and should be left in the cooling oven to dry out fully.
- DockingPricking with a fork is not decoration. It lets steam escape so the biscuit stays flat and dries evenly instead of puffing into a hollow pocket.
- Rolling and shapingRolling the dough out and cutting rounds with a cutter is easier than forming balls into cakes by hand, and gives a more even thickness, which matters when the target is uniform dryness.
- Yield and keepingThe quantities above make roughly 12-14 biscuits of about 2 1/2 inches. Cool them completely on a rack and store airtight; properly dried they keep for weeks, and they are meant to be eaten with butter, cheese or soup rather than on their own.
Captain's biscuits were the finer end of the ship's-biscuit family: the same flour-and-water principle as the hardtack issued to seamen, but mixed with milk, rolled thinner and baked to a crisper, paler finish, and by tradition associated with the officers' table rather than the crew's. By the time Cassell's was compiled in the later nineteenth century the name had largely detached from the sea and meant a plain unsweetened cracker eaten with cheese, of the kind large firms such as Huntley and Palmer and Carr's were already turning out by machine. With no fat, sugar or raising agent to hide behind, the biscuit depends almost entirely on how the dough is worked, which is where the recipe puts its emphasis.