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Rock Biscuits
Put the whites of three eggs into a pan, and stir them together with a whisk till they break. Cut some blanched, but not dried, sweet almonds into long thin slices, and put them, with an ounce of candied orange-peel cut small, and one ounce of finely-powdered loaf sugar, to the eggs; mix all well up together with a spoon, adding more almonds and sugar to make the preparation hang together if required. Put white wafer-paper on your iron plates, and lay the mixture on it in biscuits about the size of a half-crown piece, but piled about an inch to an inch and a half high. Bake them, in a slack oven, of a nice light colour.
A rough almond meringue drop, closer to an Italian brutti ma buoni than to anything called a biscuit today. The proportions in the original are deliberately loose, and the instruction to keep adding almonds and sugar "to make the preparation hang together" is the real method.
- Do not whip the whites"Stir them together with a whisk till they break" means break up the whites until slack and liquid, not to soft or stiff peaks. Whipped whites will collapse under the weight of the almonds and spread flat on the tray.
- Slack ovenA slack oven is generally reckoned at somewhere around 250-300F. These are meant to dry out and set pale, not to brown; too hot an oven will colour the almonds and sugar before the centre firms.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was cut from a hard cone and pounded at home. "Finely-powdered" corresponds to caster sugar, or granulated pulsed briefly in a grinder. Confectioners' sugar contains starch and gives a chalkier set.
- Blanched but not driedThe point of using almonds still damp from blanching is that they slice into long thin slivers without shattering. Packaged flaked almonds are the modern substitute, though they are cut thinner and will give a lighter, less craggy biscuit.
- Wafer paperWhite wafer paper is the edible starch sheet still sold for cake decorating and for nougat, often marketed as "rice paper". It keeps the sticky sugar from welding to the tray and is eaten with the biscuit. Baking parchment does the same job if you would rather not eat the base.
- Iron platesFlat sheets of iron used as baking trays. Any heavy modern baking sheet works; a thin one over a hot bottom element will scorch the sugar.
- SizeA half-crown was about 1 1/4 inches across, so these are small heaps roughly that diameter, piled an inch or more tall.
- Yield and keepingThe yield depends on how much extra almond and sugar is worked in, since the recipe leaves that quantity open. They soften quickly in humid air; store airtight once fully cold.
Rock biscuits, rock cakes and "rocks" all take their name from their deliberately rough, peaked surface, and by the middle of the nineteenth century the term covered several unrelated mixtures: this almond-and-egg-white confection, and also the heavier butter-and-currant bun still sold in British bakeries. The combination of sliced sweet almonds, candied orange-peel and pounded loaf sugar belongs to a long European tradition of nut-and-sugar drops baked on wafer paper, of which the Italian brutti ma buoni and the French rocher are close relations.