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Crisp Biscuits
A very stiff dough is required for these biscuits. To one pound and a half of flour add the yolks of two small eggs, and as much milk as will bring it to the required consistency. Beat and knead the paste till it is quite smooth, and, when rolled out thin, make it into small biscuits with a tin cutter, and bake these in a slow oven about fifteen minutes. Probable cost, about 6d.
This is a hard, unsweetened cracker in the British sense of "biscuit" — closer to a water biscuit than to anything soft. The whole character depends on how stiff the dough is and how thin it is rolled.
- The hinge: a genuinely stiff pasteAdd the milk a spoonful at a time; the dough should be firm enough to resist the hand, drier than a pastry dough. Any extra liquid gives a bready, chewy biscuit rather than a crisp one.
- Quantities in modern termsOne and a half pounds of flour is roughly 5 1/2 cups (680 g). Plain white flour is right here; the yolks of two small eggs are about 30 g of yolk, so use two modern medium yolks. The recipe gives no quantity of milk at all -- add it a spoonful at a time and be guided by the dough, not by a number.
- "Slow oven"Conventionally read as somewhere in the region of 300-325F / 150-160C, though the book gives no figures. The low heat is deliberate: it dries the biscuits through rather than colouring them, which is what makes them snap.
- Fifteen minutes is optimisticFifteen minutes may not be enough at the cooler end of a slow oven, so check rather than trust the clock. They should come out pale with only the faintest colour at the edges, and they crisp fully as they cool, so judge by dryness and lightness in the hand, not by browning.
- Roll thinner than feels rightAim for 1/8 inch (3 mm) or less. Thickness is the usual reason a biscuit of this type stays leathery in the middle.
- Beating the pasteThe instruction to beat as well as knead recalls the older tradition of working a stiff dough with a rolling pin or mallet. The recipe sets no duration; it asks only that the paste be worked until quite smooth.
- DockingPrick each round through with a fork before baking. The dough is unleavened, so it will not rise much, but trapped steam can blister the surface unevenly.
- Yield and keepingA pound and a half of flour makes a very large batch: well over a hundred biscuits from a 2-inch cutter at this thickness. Cool completely on a rack and store airtight; they keep for weeks and can be re-crisped for a few minutes in a low oven.
Crisp biscuits of this kind sit at the plain end of the Victorian biscuit range — no sugar, no butter, no leavening, just flour, yolk and milk worked hard and baked dry. They are the domestic equivalent of the commercial water biscuit and captain's biscuit that were being turned out by machine in Reading and Carlisle by the time Cassell's was compiled, and the recipe's presence in the book may suggest a household still deciding whether to buy such things or make them. The costing of about sixpence is characteristic of Cassell's, which priced nearly every recipe so a mistress could weigh the kitchen against the shop. Biscuits like these were, by most accounts, eaten with cheese, with wine, or given to invalids and children, where their virtue was said to be precisely that they contained almost nothing.