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Rice Biscuits
Beat two ounces of fresh butter to a cream. Stir into this four ounces of ground rice and two table-spoonfuls of powdered loaf sugar. Moisten the mixture with a well-beaten egg, roll it out, and stamp it into small rounds with a pastry-cutter. Put these on a baking-dish, and bake in a gentle oven. Time to bake, ten to fifteen minutes. Sufficient for a dozen small cakes. Probable cost, 6d. for this quantity.
A four-ingredient shortbread-type biscuit built on rice flour rather than wheat, which changes how the dough behaves more than the short ingredient list suggests.
- Ground rice is rice flourVictorian "ground rice" is a slightly coarser grind than today's fine rice flour, but either works. There is no gluten, so the dough will not become elastic and cannot be overworked; it will, however, crack at the edges when rolled.
- Powdered loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar sold in a solid cone and crushed as needed; powdered here means ground fine, not modern icing sugar with its cornflour. Caster or superfine sugar is the direct equivalent. Two tablespoons is about 25 g.
- A gentle ovenRoughly 300-325F (150-160C). These should set and barely colour — pale gold at the rims only. Rice flour browns reluctantly, so judge by firmness rather than colour.
- Add the egg cautiously"Moisten with a well-beaten egg" does not mean use the whole egg regardless. Eggs were ungraded and varied in size. Beat one egg and add it a spoonful at a time until the mixture just coheres; too much and the dough will not stamp cleanly.
- Roll between paperA gluten-free dough of this kind tears under a rolling pin. Roll it about 1/4 inch thick between two sheets of baking parchment, chill it for twenty minutes, then stamp and lift the rounds with a palette knife.
- Baking-dish means baking sheetA flat tin, lightly greased or lined. The biscuits spread very little, so an inch between them is ample.
- Yield and keepingA dozen small biscuits, as stated; the recipe does not give a diameter, but rounds of about 2 inches suit the quantity. They are fragile hot and crisp as they cool; leave them on the sheet for five minutes before moving them. Airtight, they keep about a week.
- The cost noteSixpence for the batch reflects late-nineteenth-century prices and is of historical interest only.
Rice flour was well established in British baking by the nineteenth century, and imports from India and the Carolinas helped keep it cheap; it produces a shorter, sandier crumb than wheat — the same principle behind the rice flour traditionally worked into Scottish shortbread. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, compiled in the last decades of the century for middle-class kitchens, is full of these small, thrifty tea-table biscuits, each with its "probable cost" appended so a mistress could check her housekeeping accounts.