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Lemon Biscuits
Rub one pound of butter into three and one-half pounds of flour, mix in one and one-half breakfast cupfuls of sugar, and, when quite smooth, add six or eight drops of lemon essence, one teacupful of honey-water, and enough milk to form a thick dough. Divide the dough, after breaking it smooth, into pieces about the size of a walnut, flatten, cut out with a biscuit-cutter, place the biscuits on baking-sheets, and bake till colored lightly in a moderate oven. Leave the biscuits till cold, and keep them in a tin canister.
This is a bakeshop formula scaled for a hotel pastry department, written in the English sense of "biscuit" — a crisp sweet cookie for the tea tray, not an American quick bread. Scaling it down is the first order of business.
- Scale it downThree and a half pounds of flour with a pound of butter will give something in the range of eight to ten dozen small biscuits. A quarter batch — about 14 oz (roughly 3 cups) flour, 4 oz butter, 6 tablespoons sugar — is a sensible home quantity.
- Breakfast cup and teacupA breakfast cupful is a generous cup, about 8 to 10 fl oz; a teacupful is smaller, around 6 fl oz. Given how much flour is in play, treat both as approximate and judge the dough by feel.
- Honey-waterHoney thinned with hot water until pourable. The original gives no ratio, so it is genuinely ambiguous; thinned honey adds a little sweetness and helps keep the biscuits from drying out.
- Lemon essenceModern lemon extract, or the oil. Six to eight drops is scaled to the full 3.5 lb of flour — cut it proportionally if you reduce the batch, or the flavour turns soapy.
- Moderate ovenUsually taken as somewhere around 350 to 375F. Small thin biscuits will colour at the edges in roughly 10 to 14 minutes; pull them when they are barely tan, since they crisp as they cool.
- "Thick dough"Add milk sparingly. You want a stiff, short dough that holds a cut edge, closer to shortbread than to a rolled sugar cookie — too much milk and the biscuits spread and toughen.
- ShapingThe recipe has you break off walnut-sized pieces, flatten them, and then cut. Rolling the whole dough to about 1/4 inch and stamping it out gives the same result faster at home.
- StorageThe tin canister matters. Cool them completely before sealing or trapped steam softens them; airtight, they keep well over a week.
Oscar Tschirky, the maitre d'hotel whose name became shorthand for the Waldorf, published his cook book in 1896, and quantities like three and a half pounds of flour survive unaltered on the page. The "biscuit" here follows continental and British usage -- a dry sweet keeping-cake served with tea or set out with ices -- and the instruction to store it in a tin canister fits that: something baked in quantity and drawn on for days rather than made to order. Honey being easier to blend into a dough once thinned may explain the honey-water.