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Snow Rocks
Take four ounces of castor sugar and the same of lard, and beat them together to a cream. Work in two beaten eggs and half a pound of wheaten flour and potato flour mixed, a little at a time, beating all the while. This should take at least twenty minutes. Flavour with a little essence of almond or vanilla, and bake in rough heaps on a greased sheet in a steady oven. When done dust with sugar. Probable cost, 9d.
A plain rock-biscuit dough of equal weights sugar and fat, twice that weight in flour, and two eggs to bind. The only real difficulty is what the original leaves vague.
- The flour mixture"Half a pound of wheaten flour and potato flour mixed" gives the total, 8 oz, but not the ratio. Recipes of the period that do specify tend to use rather more wheat flour than potato flour (potato starch, sold as farina), which lightens and shortens the crumb; a half-and-half split will work, though it is likely to bake drier.
- Castor sugarSuperfine or caster sugar. Granulated will do, though it creams less smoothly with lard and can leave the finished biscuit slightly gritty.
- LardPlain rendered pork lard, a common and cheap baking fat in British kitchens of the period, especially in plainer work. Modern shortening or softened butter substitutes at the same weight; butter gives more flavour and a little more spread.
- A steady oven"Steady" means an even, unvarying heat with no fierce top heat; the original gives no temperature. A moderate oven, in the region of 350F, is a reasonable modern reading. These are meant to set and dry rather than colour; check from about 12 to 15 minutes, until firm and just pale gold at the edges.
- The twenty minutes of beatingBy hand, that long beating was how you got air in and worked the sugar down. A stand mixer will do the work in a fraction of the time, but do not skip it entirely: there is no baking powder here, and the eggs and creamed fat are the only lift.
- Essence of almondUse modern almond extract, and use very little; a quarter teaspoon for this quantity. Period essences varied a good deal in strength, so the original quantity is deliberately vague.
- Rough heapsDrop the stiff dough in irregular mounds, a heaped teaspoon each, well apart. Leave them ragged rather than smoothing them; the recipe asks for heaps, not shaped biscuits.
- Yield and costThe quantities make roughly a pound of dough, which in heaped teaspoons will give somewhere in the region of thirty small biscuits, depending on size. The "Probable cost, 9d." is the book's own price note, an editorial habit of the period, and has no bearing on the method.
"Rocks" or rock cakes are a family of rough-dropped English tea biscuits named for their lumpy appearance rather than any ingredient, and the snow of this version is usually taken to refer to its pale colour and sugar dusting, though the book does not say so. The tell in the recipe is the potato flour: from the mid-nineteenth century onwards potato starch, sold as farina or fecule, was increasingly used in British and continental baking as a way to make cakes and biscuits lighter and shorter than wheat flour alone allowed. The costing in pence at the end is characteristic of Cassell's, which was written for households running to a budget and treated the price of a plate of biscuits as information as useful as the method. The use of lard rather than butter points the same way: butter was dearer, and a plain sweet biscuit for the nursery or the tea table could be made with the cheaper fat.