Ginger-Biscuits
INGREDIENTS for 4 dozen biscuits.-1 lb. of flour, 6 oz. of butter, 1/2 lb. of pounded loaf sugar, 3/4 oz. of ground ginger, 2 eggs. AVERAGE COST, 18.
Rub the butter with the flour; add the sugar, ginger and eggs, mix thoroughly, roll out thin, divide into biscuits, stamping them with a cutter, or cutting them with a sharp knife, and bake 5 minutes in a quick oven.
TIME.-5 minutes.
SEASONABLE in winter.
A stiff, spicy rolled cookie dough with no leavening — the crispness comes entirely from rolling thin and baking fast. Two details decide the outcome: thickness and oven heat.
- Roll genuinely thin"Thin" here means about 1/8 inch or less. At that thickness five minutes is realistic; anything thicker will still be soft and pale when the time is up, and the biscuits will be tough rather than crisp.
- A quick ovenUsually reckoned as somewhere around 400-450F. Watch from four minutes; thin sugar-and-butter dough goes from set to scorched quickly.
- Pounded loaf sugarLoaf sugar was a hard cone of refined sugar broken up and pounded in a mortar. Caster or superfine sugar is the direct equivalent; granulated works but leaves a slightly grittier bite.
- Weights in modern terms1 lb flour is about 3 1/2 cups, 6 oz butter is 1 1/2 sticks, 1/2 lb sugar is about 1 1/8 cups caster. Weigh if you can -- a cup-measured pound of flour can be off by an ounce or two and this dough has little liquid to spare.
- That much ginger3/4 oz ground ginger is nearer 4 tablespoons, assertive by current standards. Scale it back to a tablespoon if you want something milder, and use freshly bought ground ginger; old jars lose much of their punch.
- Bringing the dough togetherTwo eggs and no other liquid gives a very dry, crumbly mass. Work it firmly with your hands until it coheres; if it simply will not, add milk a teaspoon at a time rather than a splash.
- "Biscuits" means cookiesSmall, crisp, sweet, not the American quick bread. At 1/8 inch thick this quantity of dough makes far more than four dozen 2-inch rounds; a cutter nearer 3 inches lands closer to the stated yield.
- Cooling and keepingThey firm up as they cool, so judge crispness off the tray, not on it. Airtight, they keep a couple of weeks and are better on day two.
Ginger biscuits sit in a long English line of spiced hard baking that runs back through gingerbread and fairings -- the sweet goods sold at country fairs, of which the Cornish fairing, a ginger biscuit, is the surviving commercial example. The "seasonable in winter" note is doing real work: ginger was valued as a warming spice, and heavily spiced baking clustered around the cold months and Christmas. Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management (1861) gives an average cost for nearly every recipe, and the cost here -- the printed "18" is almost certainly "1s." -- reflects a household economy in which flour, butter and sugar were the reckonable expenses and the cook's time was not counted at all. The absence of any leavening is unremarkable for a thin rolled biscuit; chemical raising agents were available by then, though none is called for here.