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Champagne Biscuits
Mix the desired quantity of flour with some caraway seeds, beat up a dozen eggs to each two pounds of flour used and add gradually powdered sugar while beating until a thick paste is formed; warm some butter and beat it to a cream, so that when the sugar and eggs are well thickened this butter may be worked into them, and add gradually some finely-sifted flour and some more of the caraway seeds. Lay the biscuits on a greased paper which has been crinkled and set them with the papers into small tin moulds, and bake in a hot oven.
A sponge paste rather than a dough: the eggs and sugar carry all the lift, so the whipping is the whole recipe. Quantities are given only as ratios, and one of them is missing entirely.
- The ratio you actually haveTwelve eggs to 2 lb (about 7 cups) flour is the only firm proportion given. Scaling down, that is roughly 3 eggs to 8 oz flour, which is a workable sponge-biscuit batter.
- The missing sugarThe sugar is only ever "gradually added... until a thick paste is formed," with no weight at all. Comparable period biscuits of this type use sugar at roughly the weight of the flour; treat any figure as a reconstruction, not the original.
- Powdered sugarIn 1896 this meant sugar ground finer than loaf sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold now. Superfine or caster sugar is the closer match and dissolves into the eggs as intended.
- The hinge: beat the eggs and sugar to ribbon stageThere is no chemical leavening here. Whip until the mixture is pale, thick and falls from the whisk in a wide ribbon, then fold in flour and the cooled creamed butter by hand. Beating the flour in will knock the air out and give you a hard biscuit.
- "Warm some butter and beat it to a cream"Warmed only to soft, not melted and hot; poured hot into an egg foam it will collapse it. Work it into the thickened eggs and sugar in a thin stream, before the last of the flour and caraway go in, as the recipe directs.
- Oven heatA "hot oven" in this period is usually taken as somewhere in the region of 400-450F. Egg-and-sugar pastes of this kind color very fast at that heat, so watch them from the first few minutes; a cooler setting nearer 350-375F gives a more even crumb.
- Crinkled paper and small tin mouldsGreased parchment, pleated so the ridges hold the soft batter in shape, then set into small tins - a madeleine, finger or barquette tin does the same job. The paper is what keeps the batter from spreading before it sets.
- Caraway, twiceSeeds go into the flour at the start and again with the last of the flour, so the flavor is distributed rather than concentrated. About 1 to 2 teaspoons per 8 oz flour is in keeping; more than that overwhelms a plain sponge.
- Yield and servingThe full quantity is a bakery batch. A scaled version using 8 oz flour and 3 eggs gives roughly two to three dozen small biscuits. They are meant to be dry and keeping, eaten with wine or dipped in it.
"Champagne biscuit" was a nineteenth-century name for the dry, sweet, egg-risen finger or wafer served alongside a glass of wine or champagne - a cousin of the Italian savoiardi and the French biscuit a la cuiller, all built on the same whipped egg-and-sugar paste and all firm enough to dip. The caraway here points to the Central European end of that family, where caraway-seeded wine biscuits were long standard. The vagueness of the instructions - "the desired quantity of flour," no sugar weight at all - is characteristic of professional notes written down for cooks who already knew the paste by feel, and it is a good reminder that The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf was assembled from hotel practice rather than tested for domestic kitchens.