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Philadelphia Cracknels
Blanch one-half pound of sweet almonds, put them in a mortar, pound and mix in six well-beaten eggs, one at a time. Warm slightly one pound of butter and stir it well into one pound of caster-sugar; grate the yellow rind of two lemons, add them to the butter and sugar and then mix the whole in with the pounded almonds. Sift one pound of flour onto a paste-board, then mix in with it the almond paste and knead it well. Dredge a little flour over the paste and roll it out, cut into any desired shapes, brush them over with a paste-brush dipped in the beaten yolk of an egg and sprinkle over with caster-sugar. Place the cracknels on a buttered baking-tin and bake them in a moderate oven till lightly browned, then remove. Care must be exercised to see that they do not burn.
A pound-for-pound almond cookie of the old English biscuit tradition, scaled for a hotel kitchen. The proportions work, but the dough is far softer than a modern cookie dough and needs managing.
- Chill before rollingSix eggs against a pound of flour makes a very slack paste, and warm butter makes it slacker. Wrap and refrigerate at least an hour, then roll cold on a floured board or the shapes will not hold.
- Moderate oven350F. Thin cut-outs of this richness take roughly 10 to 14 minutes; the warning about burning is real, since the sugar sprinkled on top colors before the biscuit is set.
- Caster sugarSuperfine sugar, sold as such or made by pulsing granulated sugar briefly in a processor. It creams into butter without grittiness, which matters here because there is no leavening to hide the texture.
- The mortarA food processor replaces the mortar. Grind the blanched almonds with a spoonful of the sugar to keep them from turning to butter, then add the eggs one at a time as directed " the almonds should end up a smooth paste, not a meal.
- BlanchingPour boiling water over the almonds, stand two minutes, drain and slip the skins off. Dry them well; wet almonds throw the flour balance off.
- Sweet almondsThe specification matters in period books because bitter almonds were also sold. Ordinary supermarket almonds are the sweet kind, and are what you want.
- Butter "warmed slightly"Soft enough to cream, not melted. Melted butter gives a greasy, spreading biscuit.
- YieldUnstated. About four pounds of dough, which gives roughly six dozen two-inch cracknels; they keep a week in a tin and are meant to be dry and crisp rather than chewy.
"Cracknel" comes through the French craquelin and describes a hard, brittle biscuit that cracks rather than bends " the same family as the crisp little cakes sold by English confectioners from the seventeenth century onward. Philadelphia had a long-standing reputation in nineteenth-century American cookbooks for baked goods, particularly the fine biscuits, buns and ice creams of its Quaker and German bakeries, and dishes were often given the city's name as a mark of that reputation rather than as a claim of origin. The equal-weight pound of butter, pound of sugar, pound of flour scheme here is the old pound-cake logic, stiffened with almonds so that the paste can be rolled and cut.