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Sugar Biscuits
No. 1.--Beat a pound of fresh butter to cream. Add a pound of powdered and sifted sugar and a pound of dried flour, and any flavouring that may be preferred. Make the mixture into paste by stirring milk or cream into it; roll it out very thin, stamp it into rounds or squares; prick these with a fork, and bake on buttered tins in a well-heated oven. No. 2.--Take four eggs, with an equal weight of finely-pounded sugar and half the weight of dried flour. Break the eggs, and put the yolks and the whites into separate bowls. Beat the yolks and the sugar together for half an hour; add the flour with any flavouring that may be chosen, and when the mixture is quite smooth add the whites of the eggs beaten to a firm froth. Drop the biscuits in knobs upon sheets of buttered paper, sift sugar upon them, and bake in a quick oven. No. 3.--Put half a pint of milk into a bowl, and stir into it as much flour as will form a thick batter. Add a spoonful of salt and a gill of yeast, and set the sponge on the hearth to rise. This should be done in the evening. Next morning dissolve very gently two ounces of butter. Add this to the sponge, and knead in as much flour as will form a dough and a little powdered white sugar. Let the dough rise before the fire till it is quite light; divide it into biscuits, handling it as lightly as possible, and put these into buttered tins. Let them rise again for a short time, and bake them in a brisk oven. When they are done enough, brush them over with a syrup of sugar and water, and sift powdered sugar upon them.
Three unrelated biscuits share a name here: a rich rolled shortbread, a whisked sponge drop, and a yeast-raised sweet bun. Read all the way through before choosing, because the methods have almost nothing in common.
- Which one you are makingNo. 1 is a rolled, stamped shortbread-type biscuit; No. 2 is a whisked sponge drop of the savoiardi/Naples-biscuit family; No. 3 is an overnight yeast dough closer to a sweet bun or muffin. The quantities in No. 1 (a pound each of butter, sugar and flour) give a very large batch — roughly 60 to 80 thin biscuits. Halve or quarter it.
- Dried flourFlour was formerly warmed in a low oven and sifted to drive off damp before use in rich mixtures. Modern packaged flour is dry enough; sift it and move on.
- Gill and pintThis is a British book, so a gill is 5 fl oz (about ⅔ US cup) and half a pint is 10 fl oz (about 1¼ US cups). A gill of the old brewers' or bakers' barm is not equivalent to modern dried yeast; for No. 3, about 1½ teaspoons instant yeast slaked into the milk will raise that sponge.
- Oven temperaturesThe book's own terms are "well-heated", "quick" and "brisk". Conventional modern equivalents put a well-heated oven for the thin rolled biscuits of No. 1 at roughly 375-400F; watch for pale gold edges only, as they are almost pure butter and sugar. A quick or brisk oven for Nos. 2 and 3 is usually read as about 400-425F, and the sponge drops of No. 2 do better at the lower end so the sugared tops set without colouring.
- Half an hour of beatingBeating yolks and sugar by hand for thirty minutes, together with the separately whisked whites, is all the aeration the sponge biscuit gets; there is no chemical leaven. A stand mixer on high reaches the same pale, ribboning stage in 6 to 10 minutes. Fold the whisked whites in by hand, in thirds, or you lose it all.
- Buttered paper and buttered tinsSubstitute baking parchment throughout. Buttered tins alone will let the sugary No. 2 mixture weld itself to the sheet.
- The hinge in No. 3"Handling it as lightly as possible" is the whole instruction. The dough is enriched and slack; knock it back gently, divide with a scraper rather than kneading it again, and give the shaped biscuits only a short second rise so they bake open and light.
- FlavouringThe book leaves it open. Flavourings in common use at the period included lemon or orange peel, caraway seed, rosewater and a few drops of essence. For No. 1 use finely grated zest or 2 teaspoons vanilla per pound of flour; lemon zest suits No. 2 well.
- Milk in No. 1Add it a tablespoon at a time. The mixture should just come together as a paste — too much and the biscuits spread and toughen rather than staying short.
Cassell's arranges its entries alphabetically rather than by method, which may be part of why three quite different things sit under one heading. No. 2 belongs to the old European family of whisked egg-and-sugar sponge biscuits — the Naples biscuit, the Savoy biscuit, the boudoir — which predates chemical leavening entirely and depends on nothing but beaten egg for lift. No. 3 preserves an older habit still: setting a sponge with barm on the hearth overnight, a rhythm inherited from bread baking and used for sweet goods in households that kept their own yeast rather than buying it. By the time this dictionary appeared in the later nineteenth century, refined white sugar had fallen far enough in price for a pound of it to be spent on biscuits without comment, which is itself a marker of the period.