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Rock Biscuits, Red
Mix up sliced almonds, whites of eggs, and sugar as directed in the recipe, ROCK BISCUITS, and colour with a little cochineal. Make the preparation into biscuits as already directed, and bake in a very slack oven. The orange-peel may be omitted.
This is a variation entry rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you have the base Rock Biscuits formula in front of you, which is a stiff almond meringue dropped in rough heaps. What follows applies to the changes this version makes.
- Read the base recipe firstNothing here works without the parent entry, which sets the proportions of almonds, egg white and sugar. Take the numbers from the base recipe; none are given here.
- "A very slack oven" is 225-250F"A very slack oven" -- a slack oven is the falling, residual heat of a cooling oven, so "very slack" is at the low end, somewhere around 225-275F in modern terms. Treat these as dried rather than baked, until set and dry to the touch but barely coloured. Higher heat will colour the surface, which spoils the point of a pink biscuit.
- CochinealA red colouring made from the dried bodies of the cochineal insect, sold in Victorian kitchens as a liquid tincture. It is still available as carmine or E120, though it is not vegetarian; a few drops of any red food colouring gives the same effect. Add it to the egg whites before the almonds so the colour distributes evenly.
- Sliced almondsIn period usage these were most likely blanched nuts cut by hand into thin slivers, probably coarser than modern flaked almonds. Flaked almonds work; slivered ones give a rockier, more irregular heap.
- Don't overwork the mixtureOnce the almonds go into the beaten whites, fold rather than stir. The mixture should hold a rough peak on the spoon; if it slackens and spreads on the tray, the whites have been knocked down and the biscuits will bake flat.
- Omitting the orange peelThe base recipe evidently contains orange peel; here it is optional, and the recipe gives no reason. If you want the flavour without the flecks, a little orange flower water or grated zest does the job.
- Trays and liftingBake on parchment or on wafer paper, which was the period practice. Meringue of this kind welds itself to a bare tin, and these are too fragile to prise off.
- Yield and keepingKeeping -- once thoroughly dry they keep several weeks in an airtight tin; any residual moisture and they go sticky within a day.
Rock biscuits take their name from their deliberately craggy shape, spooned up in peaks rather than smoothed; the French rochers are a comparable almond confection. The almond-and-egg-white version belongs to the confectioner's side of the Victorian kitchen, closely related to macaroons and to the ratafias sold for trifles and charlottes. Coloured variants of this kind were suited to arrangement on a dessert dish or a tiered stand, where a plate of white and a plate of pink made a display. Cochineal was the standard red of the period kitchen, imported in quantity from Mexico and the Canaries, and it remained in use in British confectionery after synthetic dyes appeared.