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Tea Biscuits
Dissolve two ounces of fresh butter and a large pinch of salt in a pint of warm milk. Stir this into a pound of flour, and make the paste into a stiff dough by kneading it well with a table-spoonful of brewer's yeast. Put the dough into a bowl, cover it with a cloth, and set it in a warm place to rise. When quite light, roll it out very thin, stamp it into fancy shapes, and bake in a moderate oven. Tea biscuits should be eaten cold, and a little butter or marmalade should be sent to table with them. Time to bake, ten to twenty minutes, according to size. Probable cost for this quantity, 8d. Sufficient for a dish.
A yeast-raised tea biscuit rather than a chemically leavened cookie — closer to a thin, crisp roll than to anything a modern reader means by "biscuit." One instruction in the original will not work as printed, so read the hydration note first.
- The liquid is far too much as writtenAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, and 20 oz of milk to 1 lb of flour gives a pourable batter, not the "stiff dough" the recipe calls for kneading. Either the quantity is a misprint or it assumes far more flour was worked in during kneading; add milk gradually and stop when you have a firm, kneadable dough, which will be somewhere near half the stated pint.
- Brewer's yeastThis means liquid barm skimmed from fermenting beer, sold by the spoonful and much weaker than modern yeast. A tablespoon of barm is roughly equivalent to 1 to 1½ teaspoons of instant dried yeast for a pound of flour. Do not substitute the nutritional "brewer's yeast" powder sold today — it is deactivated and will not raise anything.
- Moderate oven350F/175C. For biscuits rolled genuinely thin, 375F/190C gives better colour and a crisper bite without a long bake.
- "Quite light"The dough should roughly double and feel slack and airy when pressed. Barm strength varies, so allow 1 to 1½ hours in a warm room as a rough guide and judge by the dough rather than the clock.
- Roll thin and dockThe recipe insists on rolling very thin. About 1/8 inch works; pricking each shape with a fork before baking will keep the yeast from puffing them into small blistered pillows.
- TimingTen to twenty minutes is honest for the size range, but judge by colour: pale gold and dry through. Any residual softness will not crisp on cooling the way a shortbread does.
- Yield and serving"Sufficient for a dish" means a single serving plate for a tea table — a pound of flour will give roughly 30 to 40 small stamped biscuits. Cool completely before serving, as instructed, and store airtight; they soften quickly in a damp kitchen.
- The cost note8d is Victorian pence, included because Cassell's costed almost every recipe for housekeepers working to a weekly budget. It carries no useful modern equivalent.
"Biscuit" in a British book of this date covers a much wider field than the sweet baked good it now suggests — it descends from bis coctus, twice-cooked, and the defining quality is dryness and keeping, not sugar. Yeast-raised tea biscuits like these sit between bread and cracker, and they belong to the ritual of afternoon tea as it settled into middle-class routine over the nineteenth century, when something dry and buttered was wanted alongside the cup. The use of brewer's yeast rather than baking powder places the recipe in an older tradition: household bakers bought or begged barm from a local brewery, and its strength varied so much that recipes could only say "when quite light" rather than give a time. Cassell's, published in parts for a broad readership and assembled into a dictionary, prints costings and "sufficient for" lines throughout — the mark of a book aimed at a cook answerable to a household account.