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Ginger Biscuits
Rub four ounces of fresh butter into half a pound of flour, and add three table-spoonfuls of sugar, half an ounce of ground ginger, and one egg beaten up with a little milk to a smooth paste. Make up into small round biscuits, and bake on buttered paper for eight or ten minutes; leave a little distance between each cake. Probable cost, 8d. for this quantity. Sufficient for about two dozen biscuits.
A plain rubbed-in ginger cookie with no leavening and very little sugar — closer to a firm tea biscuit than a chewy modern ginger cookie. Two things need supplying: an oven temperature, which the original omits, and restraint with the milk.
- Weights in cupsFour ounces of butter is one US stick (½ cup); half a pound of flour is about 1¾ cups. The sugar and ginger are given in spoons and ounces as written.
- The ginger is not a typoHalf an ounce of ground ginger is roughly two and a half to three tablespoons for a half-pound of flour — a fiercely spicy biscuit by current taste. Two tablespoons gives a pronounced but less searing result; older ground ginger loses potency, so ground spice that has sat in the cupboard for a year will read weaker still.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, as is usual in books of this date. Eight to ten minutes for a small thin biscuit implies a fairly brisk oven: around 375F is a reasonable modern reading, and they are done when the edges colour.
- Add the milk drop by drop"A little milk" with one egg is easily overdone. Beat the egg first, add milk a teaspoon at a time, and stop as soon as the crumbs come together into a stiff, rollable paste — a slack dough will spread and the biscuits will not hold their round shape.
- Buttered paperParchment on a flat sheet, no greasing required; it does the same job as the buttered paper with less risk of the bottoms catching.
- Only three spoons of sugarThis is a genuinely dry, biscuit-like cookie meant for eating with tea, not a sweet one. If you want them nearer a modern ginger snap, expect to raise the sugar considerably — but the texture will soften as you do.
- No raising agentThere is no soda or baking powder here, so the biscuits stay flat and crisp. Roll or pat them thin and even; thick rounds will be hard rather than short.
- Yield and the cost lineAbout two dozen small biscuits. "8d." is eight pre-decimal pence, a household costing convention Cassell's used throughout and of no use now beyond showing how cheap a spice biscuit was.
"Biscuit" in a British cookery dictionary of this date means what Americans call a cookie, and the ginger biscuit was one of the cheapest sweet things a household could bake — flour, a little sugar, one egg, and a spice that by the late nineteenth century was among the more affordable in the grocer's shop. Ginger had arrived in Britain in quantity through the colonial trade, and dried, ground ginger from India and Jamaica cost a fraction of what it had in the medieval spice market, which is why it turns up so lavishly in Victorian working recipes: gingerbread, ginger nuts, parkin, ginger beer. It is a clear demonstration of the rubbed-in method, butter worked into flour by hand, the same technique underlying pastry and scones.