Home › The Principles of Cookery › Caraway Biscuits
Caraway Biscuits
Rub a quarter of a pound of butter into a pound of flour, then add a quarter of a pound of sifted sugar, three eggs well beaten, and a few caraway-seeds. Make the mixture into a stiff paste, adding a little water if necessary. Roll it about a quarter of an inch thick, stamp it out in rounds, and prick these with a fork. Place the biscuits on floured tins, or on a wire frame, and bake them in a quick oven about ten minutes. Probable cost, 8d. per pound.
A plain sweet biscuit of the sort a Victorian household kept in a tin for tea. The proportions are lean by modern standards, and the dough behaves more like a shortcrust than a cookie dough.
- Weights in modern termsA pound of flour is about 450 g (roughly 3 1/2 cups), and each quarter pound of butter and sugar is about 115 g. The ratio is one part fat and one part sugar to four parts flour, which is why the mixture needs eggs and possibly water to come together at all.
- "Quick oven"Usually taken as somewhere around 400-450F (200-230C). At the hotter end, quarter-inch biscuits will colour in eight to ten minutes, so start checking at seven. They should be pale gold at the edges and still slightly soft in the middle when they leave the oven; they crisp as they cool.
- Sifted sugarNot confectioners' sugar. In this period "sifted sugar" means loaf sugar crushed and passed through a sieve, closest today to caster or superfine sugar. Granulated works but leaves a slightly gritty surface.
- Egg sizeEggs of the period were likely smaller than a modern large egg. Use three medium eggs, and beat them before adding so you can hold a little back if the paste comes together without all of it.
- Caraway quantity"A few" is unhelpfully vague. Two to three teaspoons through a pound of flour gives a pronounced but not medicinal flavour; one teaspoon is a hint. Caraway is assertive and does not fade with keeping.
- Handling the pasteWork it as little as possible once the water goes in, and rest it half an hour in the fridge before rolling. A stiff paste rolled warm will spring back and give tough, misshapen rounds.
- Tins and prickingFloured tins can be replaced by parchment on a heavy baking sheet. The fork pricking is not decoration: it stops the biscuits blistering and doming in a hot oven.
- Yield and keepingRoughly fifty or more biscuits at two inches across, depending on trimmings and re-rolling. Cooled completely and kept in an airtight tin they hold their snap for a week or more.
- The cost line"8d. per pound" is eightpence in pre-decimal currency, included so a housekeeper could compare making with buying. It has no bearing on the method.
Caraway has been in English baking since at least the Tudor period, first as comfits (seeds coated in hard sugar, scattered over cakes or handed round after dinner) and later loose in the dough, as here. By the nineteenth century the seed cake and the caraway biscuit were fixtures of the tea table, cheap to make and long-keeping, and the seed was widely held to aid digestion, which is part of why it turns up at the end of meals. The recipe is essentially a sweetened, enriched shortcrust, stamped and pricked exactly as a pastry cook would treat any thin flat baked good. Caraway's popularity in Britain faded through the twentieth century, and a taste that once read as ordinary now reads as distinctly old-fashioned.