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Kringles
Warm two ounces of fresh butter slightly, but not so as to melt it. Mix it with the yolks of four and the whites of two eggs, well beaten; add two ounces of sifted sugar, half a pound of flour, and a pinch of salt, and knead to a smooth paste. Roll the paste out to the thickness of half an inch. Stamp in rounds with an ordinary cutter, prick them with a fork, and bake on buttered tins in a moderate oven. Time to bake, about twenty minutes. Probable cost, 8d. Sufficient for six or eight kringles.
A plain egg-rich biscuit with no leavening at all, so the texture depends entirely on how the butter and eggs are handled. Nothing here is difficult, but the details of temperature and thickness decide whether you get short and tender or hard and dry.
- Keep the butter soft, not meltedThe instruction to warm the butter "but not so as to melt it" is the hinge of the recipe. Softened butter stays suspended in the dough and shortens it; melted butter blends into the flour differently and is likely to give a denser, greasier round.
- Weights in cupsTwo ounces of butter is 4 tablespoons. Two ounces of sifted sugar is a generous 1/4 cup (Victorian "sifted sugar" generally meant a fine sugar, so caster or superfine is the closest modern match). Half a pound of flour is about 1 3/4 cups, spooned and levelled.
- The egg ratioFour yolks plus two whites, beaten together, is the entire liquid; there is no milk or water. Reserve the two spare whites for something else. If the dough refuses to come together, it is dry flour rather than a missing ingredient — work it a little longer before adding anything.
- No raising agentThere is no baking powder, soda or yeast, and none is intended. Expect a firm, shortbread-like round rather than a risen biscuit, and knead only until smooth, since prolonged working develops gluten and toughens it.
- Moderate ovenThe recipe gives no temperature; 'moderate' is conventionally read today as somewhere around 350F. Start checking at 12 to 15 minutes; the stated twenty minutes suits thick rounds in a slower coal range and will overbake thinner ones. They are done when the edges are pale gold and the tops are dry.
- Rolling and prickingHalf an inch is thick for a biscuit and gives a cakey centre. The fork pricking is not decorative — it stops the round doming as steam builds under the surface, so prick right through.
- YieldSix to eight kringles from half a pound of flour means large rounds, about 3 to 4 inches across. A 2 1/2-inch cutter will give you closer to a dozen, which is the more useful size.
- "Probable cost, 8d."Eightpence in pre-decimal currency, a costing habit Cassell's applied to nearly every entry. It is of no practical use now beyond showing this was a cheap teatime bake.
The name points to Scandinavia: kringle is the Danish and Norwegian word for the looped, pretzel-shaped bakery emblem that still hangs outside bakeries in Denmark, and the word is often traced to the same root as "ring" and "cringle". What Cassell's gives, though, is not a plaited or filled Danish kringle but a plain stamped egg biscuit, which suggests the name reached late-Victorian British kitchens as a loose label for a foreign-sounding teacake rather than as a faithful recipe.