Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Orange Biscuits
Orange Biscuits
Put eight ounces of butter into a basin, warm and work it to a cream, adding the same quantity of orange sugar. Chop into thin slices three ounces of candied orange peel, mix it in, and add gradually four ounces of dried flour and the well-beaten yolks of eight eggs. Beat the whites of the eggs to a stiff froth, stir them in, pour the mixture into well-buttered moulds, sprinkle over a little powdered sugar and bake in a slow oven for five or six minutes. Turn them out when done, let them get cold, and they are ready for use.
A rich sponge-style biscuit in the English sense — closer to a small madeleine or ratafia cake than to anything crisp. The batter is essentially a genoise leavened only by egg white, so the folding is what makes or breaks it.
- Fold, do not stirThe eight beaten whites are the only leavening; there is no baking powder and no soda. Fold them in in three additions with a spatula, stopping while a few streaks remain, or the biscuits bake flat and dense.
- Orange sugarNot a product you can buy. Rub 8 oz (about 1 cup plus 2 tbsp) granulated sugar with the zest of two or three oranges between your fingers until it is damp and fragrant, then let it stand an hour. Period cookbooks also made it by rubbing loaf sugar directly against the fruit and scraping off the coloured surface.
- Dried flourFlour spread on a tray and warmed in a low oven to drive off moisture, then sifted. It was a way of getting consistent weight from flour stored in a damp larder; modern sifted all-purpose flour needs no such treatment. Four ounces is a scant cup.
- Weights, not cupsEight ounces of butter is two sticks; three ounces of candied peel is roughly half a cup once sliced. This is a batter where weighing matters, since flour is outnumbered four to one by butter and sugar.
- Candied peelBuy whole candied orange peel and slice it thin yourself. The pre-diced supermarket mixed peel is drier and harsher, and will read as bitter against this much butter.
- The mouldsSmall shallow tins — madeleine, barquette or tiny tartlet moulds — buttered heavily and, better still, floured. The batter is high in sugar and will weld itself to anything less.
- Oven and time do not agree"Slow oven" is usually reckoned somewhere around 300-325F, and little baked that low is done in five or six minutes. The short time implies small, very shallow moulds in a hotter oven; treat the instruction as approximate and bake at 325-350F until the edges colour and the centres spring back, checking from six minutes on.
- Turning outLet them sit in the moulds a minute so the sugar sets, then turn out and cool completely on a rack. Warm, they tear; cold, they firm into the dry, keepable biscuit the recipe intends.
- YieldEight eggs and a pound of butter and sugar together make a large batch — expect three to four dozen small biscuits. Kept dry in a tin they should hold for several days.
"Biscuit" here is used in the older English and French sense of a small dry sponge cake, not the American soft quick bread. The method — creamed butter, yolks, folded whites, a whisper of flour — belongs to the same dessert-course family as savoy and ratafia biscuits, though both of those are made without butter, and this batter sits closer to a madeleine or small pound cake. Oscar Tschirky's collection was published in 1896 and its pastry chapters draw on the English and French confectionery conventions of the day, orange sugar and candied peel among them. Candied citrus peel was a staple of the well-stocked larder long before refrigeration; boiling peel in syrup preserved a fruit flavour through the winter, and recipes like this one treat it as an everyday ingredient rather than a Christmas luxury. The instruction to dry the flour is a small period detail worth noticing — it suggests flour that arrived damp, sacked and unstandardised.