Arrowroot
This when unadulterated, is one of the most nutritious and delicate of foods, but it is too often sold mixed with more or less of potato starch.
It being so often given to invalids it should be bought of a good firm, such as Crosse and Blackwell, to ensure obtaining the genuine article. When adulterated it soon becomes thin if left after mixing, while the pure arrowroot if mixed to a jelly will remain firm for days.
It is obtained from a plant cultivated in both the East and West Indies, but it is considered that from the latter the best is obtained.
Arrowroot Biscuits, or Drops. -INGREDIENTS for 3 or 4 dozen biscuits. - 6 oz. of butter, 4 eggs, 1/2 lb. of flour, 6 oz. of arrowroot, 1/2 lb. of pounded loaf sugar.
AVERAGE COST, 1s. 6d.
Beat the butter to a cream; whisk the eggs to a strong froth, add them to the butter, stir in the flour a little at a time, and beat the mixture well. Break down all the lumps from the arrowroot, and add that with the sugar to the other ingredients.
Mix all well together, drop the dough on a buttered tin, in pieces the size of a shilling, and bake the biscuits about 1/4 hour in a slow oven. If the whites of the eggs are separated from the yolks, and both are beaten separately before being added to the other ingredients, the biscuits will be much lighter.
TIME. hour.
SEASONABLE at any time.
The entry opens as a reference note on arrowroot before giving a drop-biscuit recipe. The biscuits are a plain, crisp butter cookie, and most of what needs translating is units, sugar and oven heat.
- Slow ovenA slow oven is about 300F (150C). At that heat the biscuits dry and pale-crisp rather than browning; a quarter hour is right for coins of dough about an inch across, longer if you drop them larger.
- "The size of a shilling"A Victorian shilling was roughly an inch across, so these are small drops — about a rounded teaspoon of batter, well spaced, since they spread. That is how 6 oz butter and 1/2 lb flour stretch to three or four dozen.
- Pounded loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar in a solid cone, broken and crushed for use. Pounded to a powder it is the equivalent of caster or superfine sugar; ordinary granulated will work but gives a slightly grittier biscuit.
- ArrowrootBuy pure arrowroot starch, sold in the baking or thickener aisle. Beeton's warning about potato-starch adulteration is a period concern, and the jelly test she gives -- pure arrowroot mixed to a jelly staying firm for days, the adulterated soon going thin -- is her claim rather than a tested rule.
- Sifting rather than "breaking down lumps"Arrowroot cakes into hard nodules in the packet. Sift it with the flour rather than trying to crush lumps in the bowl, or you will find chalky pockets in the baked biscuit.
- The egg-separation noteHer afterthought is the real instruction. Whisking the whites separately to soft peaks and folding them in last is what lifts a batter with no chemical raising agent at all; done her first way, the biscuits come out dense and short.
- The garbled TIME line"TIME. hour" is missing its fraction; the method says about 1/4 hour, which is the figure to follow.
- Yield and keepingThree to four dozen small biscuits. Kept in a tin they stay crisp.
Arrowroot is the starch washed from the rhizomes of Maranta arundinacea, and by Beeton's day the West Indian trade — St Vincent above all — supplied a large part of the British market; her recipe says only that the West Indian is "considered" the best. Its reputation rested less on flavour, of which it has almost none, than on digestibility: it was the standard invalid and nursery food of the nineteenth century, mixed with milk or water into a bland gruel or jelly for anyone recovering from illness. That is also why adulteration with cheap potato starch was a live scandal, and why she names Crosse and Blackwell — a branded, sealed packet was the period's answer to a market in which loose goods were routinely cut. The biscuits here are the domestic afterthought: a way of using a pantry staple bought for the sickroom, the starch replacing part of the flour to give a short, crumbly drop.