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Water Cakes
Sift three-quarters of a pound of powdered sugar with one pound of fine flour. Add a pinch of salt and a table-spoonful of caraway-seeds. Mix well with the white of an egg beaten up with a little cold water, and roll the paste thin. Stamp it into small rounds with a cutter, prick holes in them with a fork, and bake the cakes upon tins in a good oven.
A fatless sugar biscuit of the water-cracker family: stiff, thin, and snapping crisp rather than tender. The whole recipe turns on getting the dough hydrated without overworking it.
- Weights in cupsOne pound of flour is about 3½ to 4 cups; three-quarters of a pound of caster-type sugar is roughly 1½ to 1¾ cups. Weighing is better here, since the dough has almost no liquid margin for error.
- "Powdered sugar" is not confectioners' sugarIn Victorian usage powdered sugar meant loaf sugar crushed and sifted fine — closest today to caster or superfine sugar. Modern confectioners' sugar carries cornstarch and will give a chalkier, softer biscuit.
- The hinge: water added a spoonful at a timeOne egg white against a pound of flour is nowhere near enough liquid, and the recipe leaves the water quantity to judgement. Add cold water very gradually until the mass just coheres into a stiff, dry paste; a wet dough will spread and lose the stamped edge.
- "A good oven"The book gives no temperature, and the phrase usually implied a fairly brisk heat. In a modern oven something in the region of 350–375°F is a safe starting point; these are thin and sugary, so watch them from about 8 minutes and pull them pale gold rather than brown.
- Prick the rounds properlyThe fork holes are not decoration; without them the thin paste blisters and buckles. Dock each round right through to the tin.
- CarawayA tablespoon in this quantity of dough is a firm, old-fashioned dose. A teaspoon or two suits most modern palates, and the seeds are better lightly crushed or briefly warmed in a dry pan to wake the oil.
- Tins"Upon tins" means plain flat baking sheets. The recipe does not mention greasing them; parchment will stop the sugary undersides sticking.
- Yield and keepingRolled thin and cut at about 2 inches, expect five to six dozen. Cool completely on a rack; stored airtight they keep crisp for a couple of weeks and soften quickly in damp air.
"Water cakes" belong to the long British line of biscuits bound with water rather than butter — the same principle as the water biscuit still eaten with cheese — here sweetened and seeded so they could go with tea. Caraway is often said to have been the default flavouring for plain English baking for centuries, from seed cake to the sugar-coated caraway comfits handed round after dinner, and its persistence in a book like Cassell's shows how slowly that taste faded; by the twentieth century it had largely retreated to rye bread and a few regional cakes. The fatless formula also had a practical logic in a household economy where butter was the expensive ingredient: sugar, flour, an egg white and water produced something that kept for weeks in a tin without going rancid. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, compiled in the 1870s for a broad middle-class readership, is full of such thrifty standbys set down in a few lines, on the assumption that the cook already knew what a stiff paste should feel like.