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Honey Biscuits
Place in a basin half a pound each of cornmeal and honey, two tablespoonfuls of candied orange flowers and half a tablespoonful of pounded coriander seeds. Mix these well until they form a stiff paste, divide into proportions, roll them into balls, then with a rolling-pin roll out to thin oval shapes and dock. Butter a baking-tin, dredge flour over it, lay the biscuits on the tin a short distance from each other, and bake in a slow oven. When cooked leave them until cold and if to be kept put them into tin canisters.
A four-ingredient keeping biscuit with no leavening, no egg and no liquid beyond the honey itself. The whole thing hinges on getting the paste properly stiff and the oven properly low.
- WeightsHalf a pound each of cornmeal and honey is 8 oz / 225 g of each — by weight, not volume, so measure the honey on a scale. That is roughly two-thirds of a cup of honey to something like 1 1/2 to 1 3/4 cups of cornmeal, depending on the grind.
- Slow oven'Slow' in period usage covers roughly 250–325°F (120–160°C); around 300°F (150°C) is a reasonable reading. These are drying as much as baking; a hotter oven scorches the honey before the centres set. Start checking at about 20 minutes and judge by firmness rather than colour, since honey doughs brown early.
- Cornmeal, not flourThe recipe says cornmeal: plain stone-ground yellow or white corn, not self-rising cornmeal mix and not masa. Use a fine grind if you have it; coarse meal stays gritty. Letting the mixed paste stand before rolling may help the meal absorb the honey, though the recipe does not call for it.
- Candied orange flowersCandied or sugared orange blossoms were a familiar confectioner's item in the period and are now a specialty line. Finely chopped candied orange peel is the nearest ordinary substitute; a scant teaspoon of orange flower water gives the perfume but adds moisture, so cut back the honey slightly if you use it.
- CorianderHalf a tablespoon of coriander seed, pounded in a mortar, is assertive — that is the point of the biscuit. Pre-ground coriander from a jar will taste flat and dusty by comparison.
- DockTo dock is to prick the rolled dough through with a fork or a docking roller. Without it the biscuits blister and dome unevenly.
- Buttered and floured tinHoney paste sticks ferociously. Butter and flour as directed, or use parchment, which does the job better; lift the biscuits off only once they have firmed on the tin.
- Yield and keepingRolled thin, the batch should give something like a couple of dozen small ovals, though the recipe states no yield. They must be completely cold before they go into a tin, or trapped steam softens them; sealed dry they keep well and harden as they age, which is what the canister instruction is about.
Honey and spice biscuits of this kind are the tail end of a very long European tradition — the medieval and early modern honey cake, generally traced as a forerunner of German Lebkuchen and French pain d'épices, in which honey served as both sweetener and preservative. Coriander seed and candied flowers point to the same lineage: both were confectioner's staples. The instruction to store the cooled biscuits in tin canisters is the giveaway that this is a keeping recipe rather than a teatime one. Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection gathered such items from the Waldorf's professional kitchens more or less as the cooks wrote them, which is why the recipe assumes a reader who already knows what docking is and how slow a slow oven should be.