Home › The Principles of Cookery › Cheese Biscuits
Cheese Biscuits
Warm four ounces of butter in half a pint of milk until it is dissolved, then mix it with one pound of flour to a very stiff paste, beat it with a rolling pin until the dough is quite smooth; roll it out thin; cut it into rounds the size of the top of a wine-glass. Bake from six to ten minutes. A flavouring of celery salt is a great improvement. Probable cost, 6d.
This is a plain flour-and-butter cracker, and the name describes what it is served with rather than what is in it. There is no cheese in the dough.
- The hinge: work it hard, roll it thinUnlike pastry, this dough wants beating until it is smooth and elastic — the rolling-pin thumping develops the gluten that gives a cracker its snap. Roll it as thin as you can manage, no more than about 1/8 inch, or you will get a hard scone instead of a biscuit.
- Imperial measuresHalf a pint here is the Imperial half-pint, 10 fl oz or 1 1/4 cups. Four ounces of butter is one US stick; one pound of flour is roughly 3 1/2 cups, though weigh it if you can, since the dough is meant to be very stiff and flour volumes vary.
- No oven temperature is givenCassell's assumes the cook knows. A thin cracker that bakes in six to ten minutes suggests a fairly brisk oven, somewhere in the region of 400-425F. At a lower heat the biscuits dry out slowly and turn leathery rather than crisp.
- The size of a wine-glassA Victorian wine glass rim was small by modern standards, around 1 1/2 to 2 inches across. A 2-inch plain cutter is the right ballpark; anything much larger will bake unevenly.
- Prick themThe recipe does not say so, but any thin unleavened biscuit is usually docked with a fork before baking, or it may blister and dome.
- Celery saltStill sold, still the same thing: ground celery seed cut with salt. It is strong — about half a teaspoon for the whole pound of flour, worked in with the dry flour so it distributes evenly.
- Yield and keepingA pound of flour rolled thin will give a very large batch of 2-inch biscuits. They must be cooled completely and stored airtight; they soften within hours in a damp kitchen and can be refreshed in a low oven for a few minutes.
- "Probable cost, 6d."Cassell's gives a 'probable cost' for most of its recipes. Sixpence is the late-Victorian cost of the ingredients, not a measurement, and can be ignored.
The name puzzles modern readers because there is no cheese in the list. In Victorian and Edwardian service, the cheese course arrived with a plate of thin, unsweetened, hard-baked biscuits whose whole purpose was to carry it — the same family as the water biscuit and cream cracker still sold in Britain for the same job. Baked goods of this kind were defined by their use at table rather than their contents, which is why a dictionary of cookery could file a flour-and-butter cracker under "cheese" without comment. The technique is older than the book: beating a stiff, unleavened dough until it is smooth is the same method behind the ship's biscuit and the beaten biscuit of the American South, where the pounding was often done with an axe handle or a special biscuit brake. Commercial biscuit manufacture was well established by the time Cassell's appeared, and the closing note of a "probable cost" suggests the compilers knew their readers were weighing home baking against the shop-bought tin.