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Wine Biscuits
Dry one pound of flour and sift it, then rub into it a quarter of a pound of butter, and add three heaped table-spoonfuls of powdered white sugar, one well-beaten egg, and as much thick cream as will make a stiff paste. Roll it out very thin, stamp it into rounds with the top of a wine-glass, and bake the biscuits on tins in a well-heated oven. A few currants or caraways may be added if liked. Time to bake the biscuits, a quarter of an hour. Probable cost, 10d. for this quantity.
A plain sweet biscuit dough enriched with cream rather than liquid, rolled thin and cut small. The only real difficulty is that the cream is unmeasured and the bake time is written for a much cooler, slower oven than yours.
- The hinge: roll it genuinely thinThese are meant to snap, not to be soft. Roll to about 1/8 inch (3 mm); any thicker and the centre stays cakey no matter how long it bakes.
- "A well-heated oven"Set 400F (200C). Thin biscuits want a brisk heat so they colour at the edges before they dry out through the middle.
- Ignore the quarter-hourAt 400F, biscuits rolled this thin are usually done in 8 to 12 minutes, when the rims are pale gold. Check at eight.
- How much creamThe recipe gives no quantity. Add thick (double or heavy) cream a spoonful at a time, starting with a few tablespoons, until the dough just coheres into a stiff, slightly dry paste. It should not be soft or sticky.
- "Powdered white sugar"In Victorian usage this is sugar ground fine, closest to today's caster or superfine sugar. It is not modern confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch.
- Drying the flourFlour was once stored in damp larders and was warmed by the fire before use. Modern bagged flour needs nothing; sift it and carry on.
- The wine-glass cutterGlasses varied, but the rim of a small wine glass gives a round of roughly 2 inches. Any plain cutter of about that size works, and the scraps re-roll well because there is no leavening to lose.
- CarawaysCaraway seeds, about a teaspoon for this quantity, though period bakers sometimes meant caraway comfits, seeds coated in hard sugar. Currants should be small and few, or they will tear the thin dough.
- Yield and keepingA pound of flour makes several dozen small biscuits; expect well over fifty from a 2-inch cutter. Cool them completely on a rack; they crisp as they cool and keep a fortnight in a tin.
"Wine biscuit" is often said to describe the occasion rather than the ingredients: there is no wine in the dough, though the wine-glass used as a cutter is an equally plausible source of the name. These are the small, dry, faintly sweet rounds handed with a glass of sherry, madeira or port at the end of dinner or to a caller in the afternoon, in the same family as the ratafia, the Bath Oliver and the shop-bought "dessert biscuit". The recipe demonstrates a principle rather than a specialty: fat rubbed into flour, bound with egg and cream instead of water, and rolled thin for crispness. The costing of 10d. is characteristic of the household dictionaries of the 1870s and 80s.