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Arrowroot Biscuits
2 cups arrowroot 1 cup Five Roses flour ⅔ cup butter Milk to stiffen.
Sift the arrowroot and flour. Rub the butter into the flour and stir in gradually sufficient milk to make a stiff dough. Roll out into a thick sheet, beat with a rolling pin, fold and roll out, and beat again, repeating this process 5 minutes. Roll the last time about an inch thick. Cut with round cutter. Brush with egg, and bake in a moderate oven.
A plain, unsweetened nursery biscuit of the kind meant for children and invalids. Two things govern the result: the flour-to-starch ratio, and the long beating that stands in for yeast or chemical leavening.
- Moderate ovenIn modern terms roughly 350-375F. At an inch thick these will need something like 20 to 25 minutes, and they should stay pale — barely coloured beyond the egg glaze.
- Arrowroot means the starchThis is arrowroot flour or starch (from Maranta arundinacea), sold in the baking aisle in small packets. Two cups is about 250 g; buying it in bulk is far cheaper than four supermarket tubs. Tapioca or cornstarch behave differently and will not give the same short, dissolving crumb.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-wheat all-purpose flour. Ordinary unbleached all-purpose is the right substitute; the small proportion of wheat here is all that holds the starch together, so do not reduce it.
- Milk to stiffenNo quantity is given because it depends on the arrowroot's dryness. Expect somewhere between a third and a half cup, added a tablespoon at a time. The dough should be genuinely stiff — closer to shortcrust than to scone dough — or it will spread and crack.
- The five minutes of beatingThere is no yeast or chemical leavening in the recipe, so the repeated beat-fold-roll cycle is what lightens the dough, in the manner of the older beaten-biscuit tradition. A heavy rolling pin and a firm, deliberate rhythm are what is wanted.
- Cutting and the glazeAn inch thick is correct and unusual — these are meant to be substantial. Prick each round with a fork before baking so the centres do not dome. One egg beaten with a teaspoon of milk brushes the whole batch; the recipe assumes you have the egg on hand and does not list it.
- Yield and keepingExpect about 18 to 24 biscuits from a 2-inch cutter. Cool completely on a rack, then store airtight — arrowroot draws damp quickly and the crispness is lost within a day in an open tin.
- No sugar, by designIf you want a sweeter biscuit for eating rather than for the sickroom, two tablespoons of sugar rubbed in with the butter will not upset the structure. Anything more and the low-protein dough begins to spread.
Arrowroot was the invalid starch of the nineteenth century: fine, bland, and reputed to be the most digestible thing that could be put before a sick child or a convalescent. It came chiefly from St. Vincent in the Windward Islands, where the Maranta rhizomes were washed, pulped and settled out into a white powder, and it reached Canadian kitchens as a pantry staple alongside cornstarch and sago. Biscuits like these sat at the join between medicine and food — commercial bakers sold arrowroot biscuits by the tin for teething infants, and the plain, sugarless version here is the domestic equivalent. It appears in the Five Roses Cook Book, published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to promote its flour to Canadian housewives, though the wheat flour is a minority ingredient, present only to bind.