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Venetian Biscuit
Break four eggs, and put the whites upon a plate and the yolks into a basin. Beat the whites, and when they are firm add them to the well-beaten yolks of the eggs, together with half a pound of flour, half a pound of powdered and sifted sugar, a small glassful of brandy, and a pinch of salt. Lastly, work in half a pound of butter melted but not oiled, and beat the mixture with a wooden spoon till the ingredients are thoroughly blended. Pour the batter a quarter of an inch thick into a baking-dish, and bake in a moderate oven. When it is cold, stamp it into pieces about three inches long and of an oblong shape. Split these in halves, and insert a little jam between them. Press them closely together, and cover half the number with pink icing, and the other half with white icing. Dry the icing, and the biscuits will be ready for serving.
A Victorian fancy biscuit that is really a thin sheet of Genoese-style sponge, cut, filled and iced. Nothing here is difficult, but the melted butter is where it succeeds or fails.
- Butter melted but not oiledThis is the hinge. Melt the butter gently until just liquid and still creamy-opaque, and fold it in off the heat. Butter heated far enough to separate and turn clear will not blend cleanly into the egg foam and tends to leave a greasy, dense slab.
- Moderate ovenRead as roughly 350F, though period "moderate" covers a range and no temperature is given. At a quarter-inch thick the sheet bakes fast, so start checking at 10-12 minutes; it is done when the surface springs back and the edges just begin to shrink from the tin.
- Weights in cupsHalf a pound of flour is about 1¾ cups (225 g), half a pound of sifted sugar about 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons of caster sugar (225 g), and half a pound of butter is two US sticks (225 g).
- A small glassful of brandyGenuinely imprecise in period writing. A liqueur or cordial glass of the era held roughly 1 to 2 fluid ounces; 2 tablespoons is a safe reading, and more will slacken the batter noticeably.
- No raising agentThe lift comes entirely from the beaten eggs. Beat the yolks with the sugar until pale and thick, fold the stiff whites in with a light hand, and add the flour in stages rather than beating everything hard as the wording suggests.
- The tinA "baking-dish" here means a shallow rectangular tin. A half-sheet pan lined with paper gives close to the right depth for this quantity; a deeper dish will produce a cake, not a biscuit.
- IcingPink and white here means glace icing, icing sugar slaked with a little water or lemon juice, coloured with a drop of food colour. Victorian pink came from cochineal. "Dry the icing" means leaving them at room temperature an hour or two until the surface sets firm.
- YieldA half-sheet gives something in the region of two dozen finished biscuits at three inches, depending on how wide the oblongs are cut and whether each piece is split horizontally or two pieces are sandwiched. They cut cleanest fully cold.
"Biscuit" in a British book of this period covers far more than a crisp cracker: it takes in the French sense of a light egg sponge, and this batter is close kin to a Genoese, the sheet cake behind a great deal of Victorian fancy work hough the method here, with whites and yolks beaten separately, is not strictly a genoise, which uses whole eggs warmed together. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery gathered a great many such recipes, and the tea-table pieces in it, iced in pairs of pink and white, stamped to a uniform size, filled with jam, are frankly imitations of what a professional pastrycook sold by the dozen. The name is decorative rather than geographical; nineteenth-century recipe writers attached Venetian, Neapolitan and Genoese to small iced cakes with little regard for where they were actually eaten, and no Italian source is generally traced for this one. What the recipe does record accurately is the era's taste for symmetry on the plate: two colours, one shape, arranged in alternation.