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Queen's Biscuits
Make a soft paste of the following materials. A pound and a half of flour, the same weight of powdered loaf sugar, the yolks of eighteen eggs, the whites of twenty-four, and a sufficient quantity of crushed coriander-seeds; a little yeast may also be added, if desired. Make the paste into biscuits, and bake them on paper, at a moderate heat, till they begin to brown.
This is an eighteenth-century sponge biscuit scaled for a large household, and it reads as a ratio rather than a method. The proportions are the point: equal weights of flour and sugar, and more egg by weight than either.
- Scale it down firstA pound and a half each of flour and sugar with eighteen yolks and twenty-four whites (two dozen eggs, with six yolks left over) yields several dozen biscuits. Quartering the recipe — 6 oz flour, 6 oz sugar, 4-5 yolks, 6 whites — gives a manageable batch without disturbing the ratio.
- Loaf sugarSugar was sold as a hard cone and broken down at home, so "powdered loaf sugar" means sugar pounded and sieved fine. Caster (superfine) sugar is the direct equivalent; granulated will not dissolve fully in the egg foam.
- Egg sizes have changedPeriod eggs are generally thought to have run smaller than today's large eggs, so weigh rather than count: 18 modern yolks come to roughly 11 oz and 24 whites to roughly 26-28 oz. Working by weight keeps the batter from going too slack if your eggs are big.
- "Soft paste" means a thick batterWith that much egg this is a piping consistency, not a rolled dough. Whip the whites and sugar to a stable foam, beat the yolks in, then fold the flour through by hand — beating at this stage knocks out the only leavening that matters.
- The yeast is optional and best left outBarm was sometimes added to sponge goods in this period as insurance. Modern instant yeast is far stronger and works on a different timescale; the aerated egg does the job on its own.
- Coriander seed"A sufficient quantity" is unhelpful — start with about 1 teaspoon of seed per pound of flour, toasted briefly and crushed coarse in a mortar. Pre-ground supermarket coriander has lost most of its citrus note.
- Moderate heat and baking on paperA moderate oven is usually taken as somewhere around 350F (175C). The paper is not lining a tin; the biscuits were shaped onto sheets of paper, and modern baking parchment does the same job.
- Doneness and yield"Till they begin to brown" means pale gold at the edges only, roughly 10-14 minutes for biscuits the size of a walnut. They crisp as they cool; pull them while the centres still give slightly. The full quantity makes upwards of eight dozen.
Sugar-and-egg biscuits of this kind descend from the long family of English "Naples biscuits", savoy biscuits and sponge fingers — flour, sugar and a great many eggs, leavened by beating alone, and dried in a cooling oven rather than baked hard. The name "Queen's biscuit" was applied loosely to the finer, whiter, more heavily sugared versions of these, in the same way queen cakes were distinguished from plain ones; it signals expense rather than any documented royal connection. The coriander seed is the older element here: whole spice seeds, sugared or crushed into batters, were standard in English confectionery well before vanilla became common, and the practice thins out through the nineteenth century. The recipe arrives as a set of proportions with almost no instruction, a specimen of the type rather than a worked-through method.