Lemon Biscuits
INGREDIENTS. -1¼ lb. of flour,& lb. of loaf sugar, 6 oz. of fresh butter, 4 eggs, 1 oz. of lemon-peel, 2 dessertspoonfuls of lemon-juice. AVERAGE Cost, 1s. 4d. INGREDIENTS.—1 1/4 lb. of flour, 3/4 lb. of loaf sugar, 6 oz. of fresh butter, 4 eggs, 1 oz. of lemon-peel, 2 dessertspoonfuls of lemon-juice. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 4d.
Rub the flour into the butter; stir in the pounded sugar and very finely-minced lemon-peel and, when these ingredients are thoroughly mixed, add the eggs, which should be previously well whisked, and the lemon-juice. Beat the mixture well for a minute or two, then drop it from a spoon on to a buttered tin, about 2 inches apart, as the cakes will spread when they get warm; place the tin in the oven and bake the cakes of a pale brown from 15 to 20 minutes.
TIME.- 15 to 20 minutes.
SEASONABLE at any time.
LEMON CAKE.
A plain drop cookie in the Victorian manner: no leavening, no liquid but egg and lemon juice, so the spread and the crisp edge come entirely from butter and sugar. Two of the quantities in the ingredient list are unclear, so treat the proportions with judgement.
- Ambiguous quantitiesThe flour is printed as "11 lb." and the sugar as "& lb.", neither of which can be right for four eggs and 6 oz butter; both look like corruptions of the printed original. "1 lb." is the likely reading for the flour; the sugar may have been 1/2 lb or 3/4 lb, and the figure cannot be recovered from this text. Take the eggs and butter as fixed and work to a thick dropping consistency.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar sold in a hard cone, broken off and pounded in a mortar before use. Caster sugar is the direct modern equivalent; granulated will work but gives a slightly coarser, sandier crumb.
- Oven temperatureBeeton gives no heat here, and the text uses no oven term. For a small drop biscuit taken to "a pale brown" in 15 to 20 minutes, a moderate modern oven of about 350F is a reasonable starting point; much hotter and the edges colour before the centres set.
- Lemon peelAn ounce of lemon-peel is a substantial quantity of pared zest, taking several lemons, minced as finely as you can manage. Take none of the white pith, which is bitter.
- Rubbing in"Rub the flour into the butter" is the rubbing-in method, done with cold butter and fingertips until the mixture looks like breadcrumbs. Softened or creamed butter gives a flatter, greasier biscuit.
- Beating and spreadBeat only the minute or two specified after the eggs go in; there is no raising agent, and prolonged beating simply toughens the gluten. The 2-inch spacing is not optional, as these spread considerably.
- TinsA "buttered tin" is a flat baking sheet. Parchment is easier and stops the sugary edges welding to the metal.
- YieldAt this scale expect somewhere between three and four dozen biscuits, depending on the size of your spoon. They crisp as they cool and keep about a week in a tin.
The method here is a cake method, the result is a crisp drop cookie, and the entry immediately following in Beeton is a Lemon Cake built on much the same flavourings. Lemon was the workhorse flavour of the nineteenth-century English baker, since imported citrus kept far better than soft fruit and the peel carried aromatic oil that survived the oven, unlike the juice alone. The absence of any raising agent is worth noting: chemical leavens were available by the 1860s, but a great many of Beeton's small cakes still rely on whisked whole eggs and the lift of steam, which is why she insists the eggs be well whisked before they go in. The stated average cost of 1s. 4d. was a real figure for the middle-class housekeeper the book addressed, and pricing every receipt was one of the innovations that made the volume sell.