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Water Biscuits
Rub an ounce of butter into one pound of best flour. Add a pinch of salt, and stir as much cold water into the mixture as will make a stiff, smooth paste. Roll this out till very thin, cut it into small biscuits, and bake upon buttered tins in a quick oven.
A four-ingredient cracker that lives or dies by how thin you roll it. The dough is stiff and unrewarding to handle, which is the point.
- Quick ovenRead this as 425-450F. Water biscuits want fast heat so they set and blister before they dry out; a slack oven gives you pale, tough discs.
- Quantities in cupsOne pound of flour is about 3 1/2 cups; the ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons. Water is unspecified because flours vary — start around 3/4 cup and add by the spoonful until the dough just coheres.
- "Best flour"In this period that means fine white wheat flour, the top grade of the miller's output. Plain all-purpose flour is the nearest equivalent; bread flour makes a harder, chewier biscuit.
- Stiff means stiffThe paste should be noticeably drier than pastry or pasta dough — barely tacky, almost crumbly at first. Too much water and the biscuits puff and soften rather than snapping.
- Roll thinner than feels rightThis is the hinge. Aim for 1-2 mm, thin enough to see shadow through. Anything thicker bakes into a hard bread rather than a cracker.
- DockingThe original does not mention it, but pricking each biscuit all over with a fork before baking keeps them flat and gives the characteristic pitted face.
- Buttered tinsBaking parchment on an unbuttered sheet works well; the grease in the original was presumably to stop sticking on plain iron, and extra fat can encourage browning before the centres dry.
- Timing and yieldNeither is given. Expect 8-12 minutes, turning the sheet once, until faintly straw-coloured with darker blisters.
- StorageCool them completely on a rack, then keep airtight. They soften within a day in humid weather; three or four minutes in a warm oven restores the snap.
Water biscuits belong to the family of hard, unleavened wheat crackers associated with ship's biscuit -- flour, water, a little salt and long keeping, with an ounce of butter here for tenderness. By the later nineteenth century commercial bakers in Britain and Ireland were producing the type as a refined table biscuit eaten with cheese. The recipe is really a lesson in what flour and water alone will do, with the leanness of the dough and the heat of the oven doing the work that butter, sugar and raising agents do elsewhere in the book.