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Oatmeal Biscuits
Mix well together two table-spoonfuls of oatmeal, four table-spoonfuls of flour, a salt-spoonful of salt, and a tea-spoonful of baking-powder, then put in sufficient warm water to make a nice light paste. Roll out very thin, cut into pieces about two inches long, and one wide, and bake in a smart oven for five to seven minutes.
This is a cracker rather than a sweet biscuit: no fat, no sugar, just meal, flour and water rolled thin and blasted in a hot oven. The quantities are tiny, so read the yield note before you start.
- "Smart oven" means hotA smart or quick oven corresponds broadly to what we would call a hot oven, somewhere around 425-450F. At anything lower the thin pieces dry out slowly instead of blistering, and you get chalky rather than crisp crackers.
- A salt-spoonfulThe Victorian salt-spoon holds roughly a quarter teaspoon. That is the right proportion here for an unsweetened cracker, though a scant half teaspoon suits most modern palates.
- Table-spoonfuls are the whole measureTwo tablespoons of oatmeal to four of flour is about 1/8 cup meal to 1/4 cup flour by volume. This makes perhaps a dozen small crackers; scale up by four for a useful batch and keep the 1:2 oatmeal-to-flour ratio.
- Which oatmealVictorian oatmeal means cut or ground oats, not the flattened rolled oats sold today. Pinhead or steel-cut oats ground briefly in a food processor, or medium oatmeal from a Scottish supplier, give the intended texture; rolled oats will work but stay visibly flaky.
- Warm water, and not much of itWarm water helps the oatmeal soften and absorb, but the dough should be stiff enough to roll dry. Add it a teaspoon at a time; a wet paste cannot be rolled thin and will steam rather than crisp.
- Very thin means very thinRoll to about 2mm. Thickness is the difference between a cracker and a hard little scone, and dock each piece with a fork so it does not dome in the oven.
- Five to seven minutes is accurateAt full heat these colour fast. Pull them when the edges are just tan; they firm as they cool, and a cracker that looks done in the oven is usually overbaked.
- ServingUnsweetened and unsalted enough to stand up to cheese, butter or a savoury spread. Store airtight; they soften within a day in a humid kitchen and can be refreshed for two minutes in a hot oven.
Oatmeal thins of this kind sit between the Scottish and northern English oatcake and the commercial water biscuit that was spreading through British households in the later nineteenth century. The oatcake proper is made of oatmeal alone, worked with hot water and fat and baked on a girdle; here the meal has been cut with wheat flour, lifted with baking powder and moved into the oven, the sort of adaptation suited to a middle-class urban kitchen with a coal range and a tin of manufactured raising powder on the shelf. Chemical baking powders had been commercially available in Britain since around the middle of the century, and their use in a plain cracker like this one suggests they were by then unremarkable.