Home › Biscuits › Caraway Seed Biscuits
Caraway Seed Biscuits
2 cups Five Roses flour 1 teaspoon (heaping) baking powder ½ teaspoon salt 2 teaspoons (heaping) caraway seed 4 teaspoons (heaping) sugar Milk 1 tablespoon (heaping) butter.
Mix all together thoroughly, then wet with milk or water as moist as can be rolled out. Then cut into biscuits. Put in pans, sprinkle with sugar, and bake out in pans, sprinkle with sugar, and bake about 15 minutes in moderate oven.
A plain rolled biscuit, closer to a sweet tea biscuit than to a cookie, and unusually short on liquid detail. Two things need settling before you start: how much milk, and what "heaping" means.
- The liquid is up to youThe original lists "Milk" with no quantity because the dough is judged by feel. Expect roughly 2/3 cup for 2 cups of flour, added a little at a time until the dough just holds together and can be rolled without cracking or sticking.
- Heaping spoonsA heaping teaspoon is usually reckoned at roughly one and a half level teaspoons, though period books are not consistent about it. On that reading the baking powder is about 1½ teaspoons, the caraway a full tablespoon, the sugar about 2 tablespoons, and the butter a generous tablespoon and a half.
- Moderate oven350 to 375F. At 375F these will take the stated 15 minutes; at 350F give them closer to 18. They are done when the bottoms are golden and the tops barely coloured.
- Rub the butter in"Mix all together thoroughly" glosses over the step that decides the texture. Cut or rub the cold butter into the dry ingredients until it disappears into crumbs before any milk goes in; butter stirred in after wetting gives a tough, streaky biscuit.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-wheat all-purpose flour, stronger than a modern soft-wheat or self-rising flour. Ordinary all-purpose is the right substitute here; do not use self-rising, as the baking powder and salt are already accounted for.
- Bruise the carawayA tablespoon of whole seed is assertive. Crushing about half of it lightly in a mortar spreads the flavour through the crumb rather than leaving it in isolated pops.
- Thickness and yieldRoll about ½ inch thick and cut with a 2-inch cutter for roughly 14 to 16 biscuits. The sugar sprinkled on top before baking is what gives them their finish, so do not skip it.
Caraway has been the standard flavouring for plain sweet baking in Britain and English Canada for centuries, from seed cake to the caraway comfits that stood in for candy, and its appearance in a milling-company cookbook is a mark of how ordinary the taste once was. The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal to promote its flour, and it was assembled largely from recipes contributed by users of the brand, which explains the loose measurements here: "wet with milk or water as moist as can be rolled out" is how a practised cook describes a dough to another practised cook. Note also that "biscuit" in this book means the North American quick bread raised with baking powder, not the British sense of a hard sweet biscuit, though with the sugar and the seed this particular one sits comfortably between the two.