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Beverages, Recipes for
Directions for making the following appear under their respective headings :- Almond Milk.
Apple Wine.
Barley Water.
Bishop.
Burgundy Cup.
Champagne Cup.
Cherry Brandy.
Chocolate.
Cider Cup.
Claret Cup.
Clove Liqueur.
Cocoa.
Coffee.
Cowslip Wine.
Egg Wine.
Elder Wine.
Ginger Beer.
Ginger Wine.
Gooseberry Vinegar.
Gooseberry Wine.
Lemon Syrup.
Lemon Wine.
Lemonade.
Loving Cup.
Malt Wine.
May Drink.
Mead.
Mulled Ale.
Nectar.
BISHOP. have large families of children, we give a few well-tried recipes for simple kinds.
Syllabub. Biscuits for Butter or Cheese. -INGREDIENTS. - To every lb. of flour allow 2 oz. of butter, about pint of skimmed milk.
Warm the butter in milk suntil the former is dissolved, and then mix it with the flour into a very stiff paste; beat it with a rolling-pin until the dough looks perfectly smooth. Roll it out thin; cut it into biscuits, DESSERT BISCUITS.
SAVOY BISCUITS. prick them, and bake them from 6 to 10 minutes. The above is the proportion of milk which we think would convert the flour into a stiff paste; but should it be found too much, an extra spoonful or two of flour must be put in. These biscuits are very nice for the cheese course.
TIME.- to 10 minutes.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Biscuits, Plain, for Cheese. -INGREDIENTS.-1 lb. of flour, the yolk of 1 egg, milk. AVERAGE COST, 4d.
Mix the flour and the yolk of the egg with sufficient milk to make the whole into a very stiff paste; beat it well, and Mulled Wine. knead it until it is perfectly smooth. Roll the Orange Brandy. paste out very thin; with a round cutter shape it into small biscuits, and bake them a nice brown SODA BISCUITS.
Negus.
Noyeau.
Punch (Cold).
Punch (Hot).
Raspberry Vinegar.
Sherry Cobler.
Shandy Gaff.
Syllabus.
Toast and Water.
Vanilla Liqueur Biscuits. Now that Huntley and Palmer, and Peak, Frean and Co. have brought the manufacture of biscuits to such perfection, there are but few people who consider it worth while making them at home; but for those few who prefer to have their own, as well as for those who in a slow oven from 12 to 18 minutes.
TIME.-12 to 18 minutes.
SEASONABLE at any time.
The top of this page is an index of beverage headings rather than a recipe, and the typesetting has scrambled two separate biscuit recipes into it. What can actually be cooked here are the plain crackers for the cheese course: one enriched with butter, one with an egg yolk.
- The beverage list is a cross-referenceAlmond Milk, Bishop, Negus, Shandy Gaff and the rest are pointers to entries elsewhere in the book. Nothing on this page tells you how to make any of them.
- The missing fraction"About pint of skimmed milk" has lost its fraction in the scan. For 1 lb of flour, half an Imperial pint (10 fl oz) is the plausible reading, and the book itself hedges that it may be too much, telling you to add an extra spoonful or two of flour. Add the milk gradually and stop at a very stiff, barely coherent paste.
- Slow ovenFor the egg-yolk biscuits the book calls for a slow oven, conventionally read as around 300F. The buttered biscuits are given no oven temperature at all; the short 6 to 10 minutes implies a hotter oven, but the book does not say so.
- Stiff means stiffThis is cracker dough, not pastry. It should be dry enough to fight the rolling pin, and the beating with the pin does the work that kneading does in bread, developing enough gluten to give the snap. A soft dough bakes into something bready.
- Prick themThe docking is not decorative. Unpricked, thin dough puffs into hollow blisters that scorch on the domes and stay pale in the hollows.
- Roll thinner than feels rightAim for about 2 mm. Thickness, more than time, decides whether these are crisp or leathery, and unevenly rolled sheets will burn at the edges before the centre dries.
- Average cost, 4dFourpence in pre-decimal money, when a pound was 240 pence. It is a note on household economy, not an ingredient.
- Yield and keepingA pound of flour gives roughly 40 to 50 small crackers. Cool them completely on a rack and store airtight; they soften within a day in a damp kitchen and can be refreshed in a low oven.
The prefatory note is a small piece of industrial history: Huntley and Palmers of Reading and Peek Frean of Bermondsey had by the later nineteenth century turned biscuit-making into factory work on a scale that made home production look eccentric, and the book concedes as much before offering recipes anyway, for those who prefer their own and for households with large families of children. Both recipes are usually placed in the tradition of the plain, hard, twice-dried biscuit that long predates sweet ones, the same lineage often traced to ship's biscuit and the water biscuit, and their purpose here is the cheese course, where a neutral, dry cracker was preferred precisely because it carried flavour rather than adding any. The scrambled column of beverage headings alongside them is a reminder of how these Victorian compendia were used: as reference works to be looked up, not cookbooks to be read through.