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Orange Biscuits
Beat four ounces of fresh butter to a cream. Rub the rinds of two Seville oranges with a quarter of a pound of loaf sugar, until the yellow part is all taken off. Crush the sugar to powder, and mix it with the butter; add a small pinch of salt, four ounces of dried flour, the well-beaten yolks of four eggs, two ounces of candied orange-peel, cut into thin shreds, and lastly the whites of the eggs beaten to a firm froth. Pour the mixture into small buttered moulds, sift powdered sugar over the biscuits, and bake in a slow oven for about ten minutes. Probable cost, 1s. 3d.
A small, buttery orange sponge in the older English sense of "biscuit" — closer to a madeleine or a sponge finger than to anything crisp. The whole flavour comes from one step, so give it the time it needs.
- Rub the sugar on the zestDragging a lump of hard sugar over the orange until the coloured layer is gone was the standard way to capture the oils before microplanes existed. With granulated sugar, work the zest and sugar together in a bowl with your fingers or blitz them briefly in a processor; the sugar should turn damp and orange-scented. Skipping this and simply adding grated zest gives a noticeably weaker biscuit.
- Loaf sugarLoaf or lump sugar was refined cane sugar sold in a solid cone and broken up as needed. A quarter of a pound is about 4 oz / 115 g; caster sugar is the closest modern equivalent once you have crushed it "to powder".
- Seville orangesBitter marmalade oranges, in season roughly January to February. Their peel is far more aromatic than a sweet orange's. Out of season, use the zest of two sweet oranges plus the zest of half a lemon to restore some sharpness.
- Dried flourFlour was spread in a warm place or a cooling oven to drive off moisture, since it was stored in damp larders. Modern packaged plain flour needs no drying — 4 oz / 115 g, sifted, is all this means.
- Folding, not beatingThe only lift here comes from the yolks and the whisked whites; there is no chemical raising agent. Fold the flour and the whites in alternately and stop as soon as the streaks vanish, or the biscuits bake flat and rubbery.
- The oven temperature is the weak pointThe book gives no temperatures; a "slow oven" is conventionally rendered as somewhere around 300F / 150C, which would not colour a small sponge in ten minutes. Bake in small buttered moulds or a mini-muffin tin at 325-340F / 165-170C for 10-14 minutes, until the tops spring back and the edges are pale gold. Judge by feel rather than the clock — these are small enough to overbake in a minute.
- Sugar on topThe sifted sugar before baking gives a thin crackled crust, as on French sponge fingers. Sift it on twice, a minute apart, if you want the crust pronounced.
- YieldNo quantity is given: expect about 18 to 24 biscuits from small moulds. They stale quickly and are best the day they are made, or frozen once cool.
For most of the nineteenth century "biscuit" in an English cookery book covered a wide family of small baked goods, including the light egg sponges descended from the Italian and French biscuit traditions, and Cassell's places this among them rather than among the crisp tea biscuits. The reliance on Seville oranges suggests, though the recipe does not say so, a winter dish, made when the bitter Spanish crop arrived in British markets for marmalade-making and cooks had peel to spare, candied or fresh; candied orange-peel is often said to have been a standing store-cupboard item in a well-run Victorian kitchen. The costing of 1s. 3d. is characteristic of Cassell's, which priced nearly every dish so that a housekeeper could budget from the page, and it is aimed at households watching their outgoings rather than at professional confectioners.