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Raspberry Biscuits
Pick and weigh some fine ripe raspberries, put them in an earthen jar, set this in a pan of boiling water, and keep it boiling until the juice flows freely. Pass juice and pulp through a sieve, mix with it the weight of the fruit--before it was put into the oven--in pounded sugar, and boil briskly, beating it well all the time until it forms a dry paste, and be very careful that it does not burn. Put it into small moulds about half an inch thick; dry these in a hot screen or a cool oven for twenty-four hours or more, and store for use. Raspberry biscuits are used for dessert. Time, about three hours. Probable cost of raspberries, 2d. to 6d. per pint.
This is not a biscuit in any modern sense but a dried fruit paste — a stiff raspberry pâte de fruits set in shallow moulds and dried hard enough to keep. The hinge is the boiling down: stop too early and the paste never dries, push it too far unstirred and it scorches and turns bitter.
- Equal weights, and a garbled lineThe instruction is one pound of pounded (caster) sugar to every pound of picked fruit. "Before it was put into the oven" does not match the method as printed, which stands the jar in boiling water rather than an oven; the sense appears to be that the raspberries are weighed raw, before any juice is lost.
- The jar in boiling waterAn earthen jar standing in a pan of boiling water is a bain-marie. A heatproof bowl over a pan of simmering water does the same job and coaxes the juice out without catching the pulp.
- Sieve, don't blendPassing juice and pulp through a sieve removes the seeds, which are the whole point of the step. A nylon sieve and a rubber spatula are quicker than a wooden pestle; a blender only breaks the seeds up finer.
- Boiling to a dry pasteUse the widest heavy-based pan you have and stir constantly with a wooden or silicone spatula, right into the corners. It is done when the mass pulls away from the base in a sheet and a channel drawn through it stays open for a second or two — around 106-107C on a sugar thermometer.
- Moulds half an inch thickSmall silicone moulds, or a parchment-lined tray from which squares are cut once set, both work. Half an inch is about as thick as will reliably dry through; thicker pieces are apt to stay tacky in the middle.
- "A hot screen or a cool oven"A hot screen was a rack set before the kitchen fire or in the warming closet. The modern equivalent is an oven at its lowest setting, 50-60C, with the door propped ajar, or a dehydrator at 55C. Twenty-four hours or more is not an exaggeration — the pieces should be leathery and dry to the touch on every face.
- StoringRoll or dredge the dried pieces in caster sugar and layer them between waxed paper in a tin. Kept dry they last for months; in a humid kitchen they weep and stick.
- The price note"2d. to 6d. per pint" is pre-decimal pence, and points to the summer season when soft fruit was cheapest and most plentiful.
The word biscuit here carries its older, wider sense of something twice-cooked or dried hard for keeping, rather than anything made with flour. Sugar pastes of this kind belong to the long European tradition of the dry sweetmeat — the French pâte de fruits, the Spanish quince membrillo, the English "fruit cheese" — all of them ways of turning a short, perishable soft-fruit season into something that would sit in a tin until Christmas. Cassell's places it in the dessert course, the final service of fruit, nuts and small sweetmeats set out after the cloth was drawn, where a Victorian household was expected to show a variety of little dishes rather than one large one. The technique is essentially confectionery rather than cookery, which is why the book is so insistent about constant beating and the danger of burning: with equal weights of fruit and sugar reduced over direct heat, the difference between a clear raspberry paste and a scorched one is a minute of inattention.