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LADIES' WINE BISCUITS (sometimes called Ladies' Lips)
Mix three ounces of ground rice and three ounces of finely-sifted sugar. Make them into a paste with three fresh eggs. Beat all thoroughly for some minutes, then spread the mixture evenly and thinly on paper, and bake on a well-oiled tin for twenty minutes. Stamp the paste into small ornamental shapes with an ordinary pastry-cutter, and spread over them a thin coating of icing, prepared as follows. Beat the white of an egg to a firm froth. Mix with it a quarter of a pound of finely-sifted sugar and as much cold water as will make it quite smooth. Colour part of this with two or three drops of cochineal. Spread a little on the top of the biscuits, and put them into a cool oven until the icing sets. Keep the biscuits in a tin box, closely covered, until wanted for use. Time, twenty minutes to bake. Probable cost, 7d. for this quantity.
A flourless sheet biscuit of ground rice, sugar and egg, cut out after baking rather than before. The whole thing hinges on getting the paste spread thin and even and on cutting it the moment it comes from the oven.
- Cut while hotCut while warm -- the recipe does not say when to stamp the shapes, but a thin sugar-and-egg sheet is likely to be easier to cut while still warm; once cold it will tend to be brittle and crack under the cutter.
- Ground riceThis is rice flour, sold as such today; the fine grade gives a smoother biscuit than the gritty "ground rice" pudding grade. Three ounces is about 85 g, and three ounces of sifted sugar about the same weight, roughly a scant half cup each.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A thin sheet of egg-and-sugar paste wants a moderate oven, 325-350F, for the stated twenty minutes; it should be set and pale gold, not coloured. The "cool oven" for setting the icing means 200-250F, or a warm oven with the heat switched off.
- Paper and tinBaking parchment on a sheet pan replaces the paper and oiled tin, and makes lifting the cut shapes far easier. Note that the recipe oils only the tin, not the paper, presumably to stop the sugar welding itself to the metal.
- Beating the eggsThree whole eggs to six ounces of dry ingredients is a very slack batter; "beat all thoroughly for some minutes" is doing the work a mixer now does in a few minutes. The volume you whip in is the only leavening the biscuit gets.
- CochinealGenuine cochineal is a red colouring extracted from scale insects, still sold as carmine or E120, and still legal. Any modern red food colour does the same job; two or three drops was meant to give a pale rose, not a scarlet.
- The icingOne egg white with four ounces (about 115 g) of sifted sugar is a thin royal icing. It is dried rather than cooked in the cool oven, so use pasteurised whites or meringue powder if the biscuits are for anyone who should avoid raw egg.
- Yield and keepingThe quantity makes roughly two to three dozen small biscuits depending on the cutter. The tin box with a close lid matters: these go soft within hours in a humid kitchen.
- The price"7d." is sevenpence in pre-decimal money, a shorthand Cassell's used throughout to let a housekeeper judge a dish against her weekly budget.
The ground-rice base belongs to a large family of nineteenth-century flourless sugar-and-egg wafers. Ground rice itself was cheap, kept well in a store cupboard, and was a staple of the Victorian sweet kitchen for puddings and cakes, so a little pantry stock could be turned into a plate of iced fancies fit for the dessert table, which is precisely the sort of economy Cassell's was written to demonstrate.