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Cracknels
Beat eight eggs with eight table-spoonfuls of rose-water and a grated nutmeg. Mix with them just over two quarts of flour with sufficient cold water to make a stiff paste. Mix with the paste two pounds of butter, and make it into cracknels. Put them into a pan of boiling water, and boil them until they swim. Then put them into cold water, and, when they are hardened, dry them, and bake them on tinplates in a moderate oven. Time to bake, about a quarter of an hour. Probable cost, 5s. for this quantity.
A boiled-then-baked biscuit of the same family as the bagel and the pretzel, scaled for a Victorian household. Everything about it is large, dry and hard by design.
- The hinge: they must floatThe boiling stage is not optional and not a formality. The dough pieces sink, then rise as the starch on the outside gelatinises and sets a skin; that skin is what gives a cracknel its glassy, brittle bite after baking. Lift them the moment they swim, not before.
- Cut them thinThe recipe never says how large to make them. Cracknels were generally rolled thin and cut small, and thin is the point: anything thick will bake soft in the middle.
- QuantityTwo quarts of flour is a dry measure, roughly eight cups, somewhere around 2 lb or 1 kg. With eight eggs and 2 lb of butter this is a genuinely enormous batch -- several dozen small biscuits at least. Quartering it is sensible for a domestic oven.
- Rose-waterEight tablespoons is half a cup, and that is the dominant flavour of the dish alongside the nutmeg. Modern rose-water varies wildly in strength, so start with a quarter of that amount and taste the raw paste.
- "Moderate oven"Conventionally taken as around 350F/175C. A quarter of an hour is right for thin cracknels; they should be pale gold, not browned.
- The cold water and dryingChilling firms the boiled paste so it can be handled, but any surface water will steam in the oven and soften the crust. Blot each one and let them air-dry on a rack until the surface looks matt before they go on the trays.
- TinplatesPlain flat baking sheets.
- KeepingDried properly they keep well in a tin. If they go leathery, ten minutes in a low oven brings back the snap.
Cracknels are among the older English biscuit types, the name reaching English via Old French craquelin, itself from Middle Dutch krakeling -- a word still used in the Low Countries for a hard twisted or knotted biscuit, and connected to the same imitative root as "crack". Boiling dough before baking, as here, produces a biscuit dry and hard enough to travel and to store, which mattered a great deal before airtight packaging. Cassell's compiled this dictionary in the later nineteenth century, and the rose-water and nutmeg here reflect the older English taste for rose and orange-flower water in baking, a habit that faded through the twentieth century in favour of vanilla. The stated cost of 5s. for the batch is a reminder of how much of the expense sat in the two pounds of butter.