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Simple Cakes
Rub four ounces of fresh butter into half a pound of biscuit flour. Add a pinch of salt, three table-spoonfuls of finely-sifted sugar, and a well-beaten fresh egg. Roll the pastry out to the thickness of a quarter of an inch, stamp it into fancy cakes with a cutter, and bake these upon tins in a well-heated oven. Time to bake, about twenty minutes.
A plain rubbed-in biscuit dough, closer to a shortbread than a cake. The one thing that needs rethinking is the baking: twenty minutes is far too long for quarter-inch biscuits in a hot oven.
- WeightsFour ounces of butter is one US stick (115 g); half a pound of flour is about 225 g, or a scant 2 cups. Three tablespoons of sifted sugar is roughly 35 g, so this is a barely sweet biscuit by modern taste.
- "Biscuit flour"A soft, finely milled low-protein flour, not self-raising. Plain all-purpose works; a mix of all-purpose with a couple of tablespoons of cornstarch swapped in gets closer to the short, sandy crumb intended.
- Oven and timeA "well-heated oven" in this period is usually reckoned at somewhere around 400-425F, though such terms were relative to the particular range and cannot be pinned to a figure. At that heat quarter-inch biscuits should be done in 8-12 minutes rather than twenty; watch for pale gold edges rather than the clock, or bake at 350F and check at 12 minutes.
- Rubbing inKeep the butter cool and work it into the flour with fingertips until it looks like coarse meal. Warm butter gives a greasy, spreading dough that loses the cut shapes.
- No raising agentThere is no baking powder here, and none is wanted. The egg is the only lift, and the result is meant to be crisp and short. Chill the rolled sheet for fifteen minutes before stamping if the kitchen is warm.
- Tins"Bake upon tins" means flat baking sheets; the recipe does not say whether to grease them. With this much butter sticking is unlikely; parchment is convenient but not necessary.
- YieldAbout two dozen biscuits from a two-inch cutter. They keep a week in a tin.
The word "cake" here carries its older, broader English sense of any small flat baked thing, which is why the same source can use it for what an American reader would call a cookie and a Scot a biscuit. Recipes of this shape recur through Victorian household manuals in many variations, distinguished only by a handful of caraway, a scrape of lemon rind or a little more sugar, and they belonged to the tea table and the nursery rather than the dinner service.