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Yorkshire Biscuits
For these old-fashioned favourites the following ingredients are required. Two pounds of flour, two and a half ounces of butter, two and a half ounces of sugar, one egg, half a pint of milk, and a pinch of carbonate of ammonia. The milk should be warmed and the butter dissolved in it, then added to the other ingredients. The ammonia should be sifted with the flour. Roll out the paste a quarter of an inch thick, and cut it into fingers an inch wide and three long. Brush over with egg, and bake in a moderate oven. Probable cost, 10d.
A plain, hard tea biscuit leavened not with baking powder but with baker's ammonia, which gives a crisp, shattering texture that soda cannot match. Everything hinges on baking them thin and dry.
- Carbonate of ammoniaThis is baker's ammonia (hartshorn, ammonium carbonate), still sold for German and Scandinavian baking. It works only in thin, dry goods: the gas must escape completely during baking, and in anything thick or moist the residue leaves a sharp ammoniac taste. Baking powder is not a like-for-like swap here — the biscuit will be softer and duller.
- "A pinch" is too vagueFor two pounds of flour a pinch is plainly not enough, and the original gives no usable figure. Common practice with baker's ammonia is roughly one to two teaspoons per pound of flour, ground fine and sifted through with the flour as directed.
- The smellThe kitchen will smell strongly of ammonia while these bake. That is normal and it disperses; open a window and do not be tempted to pull the biscuits early, since underbaking is what leaves the taste behind.
- Imperial measuresHalf a pint of milk in an English book of this date is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. Two pounds of flour is roughly 7 cups — this is a large batch by modern standards and halves cleanly.
- OvenThe book gives no temperature; a moderate oven is usually taken as somewhere around 350F (175C). Bake until the fingers are pale gold and firm right through, probably in the region of 12-15 minutes at a quarter-inch thickness; they crisp further as they cool.
- Handling the pasteWarming the milk to melt the butter is enough — it should be no more than blood-warm when it meets the flour, or the ammonia begins working before the dough is rolled. Mix to a stiff paste, roll once, and cut cleanly rather than re-rolling scraps repeatedly.
- Yield and keepingTwo pounds of flour will give something in the region of six to seven dozen fingers. Cooled completely and kept airtight they hold their snap for a couple of weeks; they were meant as a keeping biscuit, not a fresh bake.
- The cost noteTenpence is a pre-decimal price for the whole batch, included so a housekeeper could budget. It has no modern equivalent worth calculating.
Baker's ammonia was widely used as a leavener in the commercial biscuit trade in the nineteenth century, and its appearance in a domestic manual like Cassell's suggests how far bakehouse practice had travelled into the home kitchen by the late nineteenth century. The plain, hard, finger-shaped biscuit — cheap, long-keeping, made from flour with only a little butter and sugar to enrich it — sits with the northern English tea table rather than with fashionable confectionery, and "Yorkshire" here may signal thrift and plainness as much as any particular place of origin. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery was assembled as an alphabetical reference for middle-class households, which is why the entry ends with a probable cost: the book expected its readers to be pricing every dish. Ammonium carbonate itself was long known as hartshorn, from the older method of obtaining it by destructive distillation of deer antler, though by this period it was produced industrially.