Home › B › Biscuits, Recipes for
Biscuits, Recipes for
Directions for making the following appear under their respective headings .- Arrowroot.
Cheese.
Cocoa Nut.
Dessert.
For Butter or Plain.
Cheese.
Ginger.
Lemon.
Raised.
Savoy.
Seed. | Soda.
Bishop. INGREDIENTS for sufficient for 6 persons.-1 bottle of port, 2 lemons, 2 0% of loaf sugar, 1 tumbler of water, spice to taste. AVERAGE COST. 48.
BLACK-COCK, FILLETS OF.
Stick one of the lemons with cloves and bake it. Boil the spice in the water, boil the wine, taking off some of the spirit with a lighted paper. Add the water and the baked lemon, and let it stand near the fire while rubbing the sugar on the rind of the other lemon. Warm a bowl, put the lumps of sugar in, squeeze over half the juice of the lemon, then pour the wine into the bowl and serve.
SEASONABLE in winter.
Black-cock, Fillets of, à la Financiere. INGREDIENTS for large entrée dish.-2 birds, 1 pint of weak stock, cayenne and salt to taste, financière sauce. AVERAGE COST, 5s. per brace.
Cut the birds into neat fillets and stew in the stock till tender; put them on an entrée dish, squeeze over a few drops of lemon, and pour over a good financière sauce. The trimmings of the birds may be stewed first to make a gravy, which should be slightly thickened, and is improved by a glass of sherry, to use in place of the sauce.
TIME. hour.
SEASONABLE in autumn.
BLANCMANGE.
Two drinks-and-game entries sit here beside a cross-reference list for biscuits. Both are workable, though one depends on a bird you cannot buy and the other on a sugar form that has largely disappeared.
- The biscuit list is a pointer, not a recipeThe opening lines are Mrs Beeton's index of biscuit types, each with its own entry elsewhere in the book. Nothing there is meant to be cooked from as it stands.
- Bishop is a mulled portOne bottle of port, spiced and warmed, serving six means small glasses, which is right for a fortified wine at about 20% alcohol. It is a hot punch, not a table wine.
- Loaf sugar and the lemon rindLoaf sugar was a hard cone broken into lumps; use white sugar cubes, which behave the same way when rubbed over a lemon to strip the oil from the zest. Two ounces is about 55 g.
- A tumbler of waterA tumbler is usually taken as about half a pint, roughly 280 ml. The spices are boiled in this and the liquid goes into the bowl, so it dilutes the port noticeably.
- The baked lemonStud one lemon with cloves and bake it until soft and fragrant; the recipe gives no oven temperature or time. It is there to perfume the wine, not to be eaten.
- Burning off spirit with a lighted paperThe instruction is to flame the surface of the hot port to reduce the alcohol. A modern alternative is to heat the wine to just below a simmer and hold it there; boiling it hard strips the fruit along with the spirit.
- Black grouseBlack-cock is the male black grouse, now red-listed in Britain and rarely offered by game dealers. Any well-hung game bird will take the same treatment; two red-legged partridges give a similar quantity of fillet.
- Financiere sauceA rich brown sauce built on demi-glace with Madeira, mushrooms, truffle and often cockscombs. A good reduced game gravy with sherry, as the recipe itself suggests in its second sentence, is the practical route.
- Cooking the filletsBreast fillets of a small game bird poached in weak stock need roughly 10-15 minutes and are dry past that point. Game birds of this size are better kept pink at the centre than stewed until they fall apart.
Bishop belongs to a family of Georgian and Victorian ecclesiastical punches - bishop made with port, cardinal with claret or champagne, pope with burgundy - the names traditionally explained as a joke about the colour of clerical robes. It appears in English drink books well before Mrs Beeton and turns up in Dickens, most famously in the bowl of smoking bishop Scrooge promises Bob Cratchit. The clove-studded roasted lemon or orange is the constant element across all the versions: baking concentrates the fruit and releases the clove oil, and the fruit was often floated whole in the bowl. Its place in a household manual alongside game entrees reflects the shape of a Victorian winter table, where a hot spiced wine was as much a part of the season's hospitality as the birds sent down from a shoot.