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Soda Biscuits
No. 1.--Rub a quarter of a pound of butter into a pound of flour, and add a pinch of salt and six table-spoonfuls of powdered sugar. Whisk two eggs, and stir them into the flour; add a tea-spoonful of carbonate of soda dissolved in a spoonful of hot milk, and beat the mixture till it is smooth and light. Roll the pastry out to the thickness of half an inch, stamp it into fancy shapes, and bake immediately in a quick oven. No. 2.--Dissolve six ounces of butter, six ounces of sugar, a pinch of salt, and a tea-spoonful of carbonate of soda in a pint of warm milk, and stir into the liquor as much flour as will form a stiff dough. Knead the pastry till it is smooth and light, and roll it out to the thickness of a quarter of an inch. Stamp it in rounds and bake immediately. No. 3.--Beat the yolk of an egg, mix it with a pound of flour, and add a pinch of salt. Dissolve a tea-spoonful of carbonate of soda in a table-spoonful of warm milk; stir this into the flour, with additional milk, to make a stiff dough. Knead well, beat with a rolling-pin, and roll the dough out very thin. Stamp it into fancy biscuits, and bake these in a moderate oven. When the biscuits are crisp they will be sufficiently baked. Time to bake the biscuits, twelve to twenty minutes.
Three variants on the same idea: a hard, crisp English biscuit in the cracker-to-shortbread range, leavened chemically rather than with yeast. Note that these are biscuits in the British sense, not American soda-risen scones.
- Carbonate of soda needs an acidThis is plain baking soda. None of the three formulas includes an acid, so much of the soda stays unreacted and can leave a soapy, faintly metallic taste. Either use a teaspoon of modern baking powder in its place, or keep the soda and switch the milk to buttermilk or soured milk, which a Victorian kitchen may well have had to hand.
- Oven temperaturesA "quick oven" (No. 1) is conventionally reckoned at about 425-450F, and the "moderate oven" of No. 3 at about 350F; No. 2 specifies no oven at all. Bake on the upper-middle shelf with a sheet of parchment; Nos. 1 and 2 carry enough sugar to catch.
- The stated time is for the coolest versionThe stated time -- Twelve to twenty minutes follows immediately on No. 3 and suits thin biscuits in a moderate oven; thicker rounds in a hotter oven will want less. The instruction to bake until crisp is the reliable test, not the clock.
- No. 2 has no flour quantity"As much flour as will form a stiff dough" with a pint of warm milk works out to roughly 1 lb 12 oz to 2 lb of flour, but the amount genuinely depends on how stiff you want it. Add the flour in stages and stop when the dough no longer sticks to the bowl.
- Butter into flour, coldFor No. 1, rub the butter in cold, as for pastry; 4 oz to 1 lb of flour gives a short, crumbly biscuit. No. 2 melts its butter into the milk, which produces a tougher, crisper, more cracker-like result.
- Beating with the rolling pinIn No. 3 this is not decorative. Repeated folding and whacking develops and aligns the gluten in a very lean dough, the same principle behind ship's biscuit and water crackers, and it is what makes the finished biscuit snap rather than crumble.
- Bake immediatelyNos. 1 and 2 both say so for a reason: the soda starts to work as soon as it is wetted, and a tray left standing will bake flatter and denser.
- YieldA pound of flour cut into 2-inch rounds gives a few dozen biscuits, the number depending greatly on thickness: fewer from the half-inch No. 1, many more from the very thin No. 3. Cool them completely on a rack; stored airtight they keep crisp for a couple of weeks, and they soften quickly in a humid kitchen.
"Soda biscuit" here marks a specific moment in nineteenth-century baking, when cheap manufactured bicarbonate of soda replaced the older reliance on yeast, eggs alone, or hartshorn for lifting doughs. By the time Cassell's compiled its Dictionary of Cookery in the 1870s the tin of carbonate of soda was standard kitchen equipment, cheap enough that a household could turn out tea biscuits without waiting on a sponge. The word biscuit keeps its older sense of something twice-cooked and dry, hence the insistence that they are done when crisp. Giving three numbered versions of one dish is characteristic of the book, which ranges from the rich buttery No. 1 down to the almost fatless No. 3.