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Rice Biscuits or Cakes
INGREDIENTS for 18 cakes. lb. of rice-flour, lb. of pounded lump sugar, 1/4 lb. of butter, 2 eggs. AVERAGE COST, 8d.
Beat the butter to a cream, stir in the rice-flour and pounded sugar, and moisten the whole with the eggs, which should be previously well beaten. Roll out the paste, shape it with a round paste-cutter into small cakes, and bake them from 12 to 18 minutes in a very slow oven.
TIME.-12 to 18 minutes.
SEASONABLE at any time.
RICE BLANCMANGE.
A short, sandy shortbread made with rice flour instead of wheat. The transcription has lost some of its fractions, so read the quantities with care before scaling.
- The missing fractionsThe rice-flour and sugar weights have dropped out of the text; only the butter (1/4 lb, about 115 g) and the eggs survive intact. Beeton's proportions for this style of cake are generally 1/2 lb rice flour to 1/4 lb sugar and 1/4 lb butter, but that is a reconstruction rather than what the page states.
- "Very slow oven"Around 250-275F (120-135C). These are meant to dry out and pale-set rather than colour; at 350F they will brown at the edges before the centres firm.
- Pounded lump sugarLoaf sugar crushed to a powder in a mortar. Caster sugar is the direct modern equivalent; granulated leaves a gritty crumb in a dough with no liquid to dissolve it.
- Rice flour is not a wheat substituteWith no gluten, the paste will not stretch and cannot be kneaded. Expect a crumbly, almost sandy mass that holds together only under pressure, and handle it as little as possible.
- Rolling and cuttingChill the paste for 20-30 minutes before rolling, work between sheets of baking paper, and cut a scant 1/4 inch thick. Patch cracks by pressing rather than re-rolling.
- Creaming the butterBeat the butter thoroughly soft before anything goes in; there is no raising agent, so what lift there is comes from the creamed butter and the well-beaten eggs the recipe calls for.
- Timing and donenessTwelve to eighteen minutes is right only for small, thin rounds at low heat. They stay soft in the oven and crisp as they cool, so judge by a dry, matte surface rather than by snap.
- Yield and keepingEighteen small biscuits; the page gives no diameter. Airtight, they should keep for several days.
Rice flour was in use in British kitchens well before the nineteenth century, and Victorian cookery books used it freely for anything meant to be light, pale and dry: blancmanges, puddings, sponge-like cakes and biscuits of this kind. Rice Blancmange follows on the same page as part of a run of rice entries. "Biscuit" here keeps its older English sense of a small hard-baked sweet, hence the very slow oven, which dries the cake through rather than raising it. Rice preparations were often recommended for invalids and children on the grounds that they were easy of digestion, a claim that reflects period medical thinking rather than any documented property of the grain.