Home › The Principles of Cookery › Lemon Biscuits
Lemon Biscuits
Rub the rind of a large fresh lemon upon a quarter of a pound of loaf sugar, then crush it to powder. Work three ounces of fresh butter into half a pound of fine flour, add the powdered sugar, and the yolks of three eggs, well beaten. When thoroughly mixed, add last of all the whites of the eggs, whisked to a firm froth; stir all briskly for two or three minutes, then drop the cakes upon a baking-sheet, a little apart from each other, and bake in a moderate oven. Two or three ounces of currants may be added, if liked. Time to bake, twenty minutes. Probable cost, 10d. Sufficient for a dozen and a half biscuits.
A short, eggy drop cookie leavened only by whisked whites, from an era when "biscuit" meant a small crisp sweet cake. The measurements convert cleanly; the technique needs one or two notes.
- Weights in cupsA quarter pound of sugar is about 1/2 cup once crushed; half a pound of fine flour is 8 oz, roughly 1 3/4 cups; three ounces of butter is 6 tablespoons. Weighing is more reliable than scooping here, since the dough has no leavening to forgive a heavy hand with flour.
- Loaf sugar and the rindLoaf sugar was hard refined sugar broken from a cone, and rubbing the lemon on it drew the oil out of the zest into the sugar. Use sugar cubes the same way, or rub finely grated zest into granulated sugar with your fingers until it smells strongly of lemon. This is the step that gives the biscuits their flavour and it should not be skipped in favour of juice.
- "Fine flour"Finely sifted plain white flour. English household flour of the period was soft wheat, so pastry flour is probably nearer the mark than bread flour. All-purpose works; a lower-protein flour gives a shorter, more tender crumb.
- Moderate oven350F. The biscuits are pale by design and should barely colour beyond the edges.
- Twenty minutes is for large cakesCheck them early -- Dropped in tablespoon-sized mounds they may be set and lightly golden at the rim by 12 to 15 minutes, though the recipe gives twenty for this yield of eighteen. Take them when the rims colour rather than running to the clock.
- The whites are the only liftThere is no baking powder in this dough. Whisk the whites to a firm but not dry froth, fold rather than beat them in, and get the tray into the oven promptly. The instruction to "stir all briskly for two or three minutes" will knock most of the air out if taken literally.
- Spacing and currantsThe recipe says only to drop them "a little apart from each other"; leave room for some spread. Two to three ounces of currants is about 1/2 cup; toss them in flour first so they do not sink to the bottom edge.
- YieldEighteen biscuits as written, more if you drop them small. They keep a few days in a tin but are best the day they are baked, before the lemon oil fades.
Cassell's places this among a family of small sugar-and-egg cakes that fill the sweet-biscuit pages of nineteenth-century British cookery books, most of them variations on the same ratio of flour, butter, sugar and eggs with a single flavouring. The loaf sugar is the period detail: refined sugar was long sold as a hard cone from which pieces were broken with sugar nippers, and rubbing lemon rind against that hard surface was a common way to capture citrus oil before microplanes existed. The "probable cost, 10d" is characteristic of Cassell's, which priced nearly every receipt so that a housekeeper could judge a dish against her weekly budget.