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Rice Biscuits
½ pound white sugar ½ pound ground rice ½ pound butter (or ¼ pound butter, ¼ pound lard) ½ pound Five Roses flour ½ teaspoon baking powder (or 1 teaspoon cream tartar and ½ teaspoon soda) 2 eggs.
Mix with sweet milk or water.
Roll as for cookies. Cut in round or square cakes, and bake.
A short, sandy English-style biscuit built on equal weights of sugar, rice flour, fat and wheat flour. The original gives no oven temperature, no liquid quantity and no time, so the notes below fill in what the period cook was assumed to know.
- "Biscuits" means cookiesIn this section of the book a biscuit is a thin sweet baked round, not an American quick bread. Rolled and cut like cookies, they should be crisp rather than soft.
- Weights to cups½ pound sugar is about 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons granulated; ½ pound flour is about 1¾ cups; ½ pound ground rice is roughly 1½ cups; ½ pound butter is 2 sticks. Weighing is more reliable here, since the whole recipe is a balance of four equal weights.
- Ground riceGround rice is plain rice flour, coarser than the modern superfine grind but interchangeable with it. Do not substitute glutinous or sweet rice flour, which behaves nothing like it.
- Sweet milkSweet milk simply means fresh unsoured milk, as opposed to the buttermilk or sour milk called for elsewhere in the book. Any whole milk works.
- The liquid is deliberately vagueAdd milk or water a tablespoon at a time, only until the mass just coheres into a stiff, rollable dough. Too much and the biscuits toughen and spread; the fat and eggs already carry most of the moisture.
- Leavening optionsThe alternative given, 1 teaspoon cream of tartar with ½ teaspoon soda, is the older self-mixed leavening the book offers in place of the ½ teaspoon baking powder, though by modern reckoning the self-mixed version is the stronger of the two. Either way the amount is small, and these are meant to stay flat and short.
- Oven and timeThe original gives neither temperature nor time; a moderate oven, about 350F, for 10 to 14 minutes, until the edges are pale gold and the centres set, is a reasonable modern reading. Rice flour browns slowly, so judge by the rims rather than overall colour.
- HandlingThe dough is short and crumbly from the rice flour. Chill it for half an hour before rolling, roll about ¼ inch thick, and lift the cut shapes with a thin spatula.
- YieldThe original gives no yield. A batch this size, rolled ¼ inch thick, will make upwards of four dozen 2-inch biscuits. They keep well for a week in a tin and crisp up again in a low oven.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg and given away or sold cheaply to promote Five Roses flour, which explains why the flour is named in the ingredient list while the sugar and butter are not. Rice biscuits of this kind belong to a long British tradition of sweet baking stiffened with ground rice, which was cheap, kept well, and gave a distinctive dry, sandy bite that plain wheat flour cannot; the same trick underlies Scottish shortbread recipes that swap a portion of flour for rice. The double leavening instruction, baking powder or cream of tartar with soda, is a good marker of the period: commercial baking powder was widely available in Canada by the early twentieth century, though some households still mixed their own from the two component powders, and cookbooks of the era commonly gave both.