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Eastwell Biscuits
Mix one pound of flour with a pinch of salt. Rub in eight ounces of butter, and add eight ounces of sugar, a little grated ginger, and three eggs, to make a soft paste. Let this rest for an hour. Roll it thinly and stamp it into small shapes. Bake in a moderate oven. Before baking brush the shapes over with egg and sprinkle washed and dried currants or chopped almonds on the top.
A plain rich shortbread-type dough at a 2:1:1 ratio of flour to butter to sugar, bound with egg. The original assumes you know how long biscuits take, so the useful additions are a temperature, a time and a thickness.
- Moderate ovenRead this as 350F (175C). At that heat thin stamped biscuits take 10 to 14 minutes; pull them when the edges have coloured and the centres still look pale, as they firm on the tray.
- Scale of the batchOne pound of flour with the rest in proportion is a large batch by modern standards, giving roughly 50 to 60 small biscuits. Halving it works cleanly: 8 oz flour, 4 oz butter, 4 oz sugar, and one large egg plus a little of a second if the paste is stiff.
- Three eggs is generousVictorian eggs ran smaller than today's large ones. Add the eggs one at a time and stop when the paste just comes together as a soft, rollable dough; a wet dough will spread and lose the stamped edges.
- The rest mattersThe hour's rest is the hinge. It hydrates the flour and firms the butter so the shapes hold their outline. Rest it in the refrigerator, wrapped, rather than at room temperature.
- Roll it thinlyAbout 1/8 inch (3 mm). Thicker and you get a cake-like biscuit rather than the crisp snap this dough is built for. Re-chill the offcuts before rerolling.
- Grated ginger"A little grated ginger" here may well mean dried root grated on a nutmeg grater, closer in flavour to ground ginger than to fresh, though fresh root cannot be ruled out. Use 1 to 2 teaspoons of ground ginger for the full-pound batch, or grate fresh root for a sharper, more aromatic result.
- Washed and dried currantsNineteenth-century dried currants arrived dusty and sometimes gritty, hence the washing. Modern packaged currants need no rinse, but they scorch quickly on top of a thin biscuit: press them lightly into the egg wash rather than perching them, and check the tray at 10 minutes.
- SugarUse caster sugar. Granulated will not dissolve fully in a dough this dry and leaves a slightly gritty biscuit.
Eastwell is a name attached to more than one English village, in Kent and in Leicestershire, and there is no clue which one is meant; like many named biscuits in Victorian dictionaries of cookery, the label probably travelled with a household or a cookery-school recipe rather than any documented local tradition. What is clear is the type: a rubbed-in egg-enriched shortbread, rolled thin, stamped with tin cutters and finished with an egg wash and a scatter of currants or almonds. Stamped tea biscuits of this sort proliferated in nineteenth-century Britain, and it is often suggested that cheap sheet-metal cutters and more reliable ovens made them practical for domestic cooks, and that afternoon tea created a steady demand for something small, dry and keepable in a tin. The near-identical proportions turn up across the period under a number of different place names, which says more about how recipes were credited than about where they were invented.