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Wine Biscuits
Slightly warm four ounces of butter and beat it to a cream with a wineglassful of wine. Mix eight ounces of flour with eight ounces of crushed-sugar, then mix it to a paste with the wine and butter, stirring in also four well-beaten eggs. Sprinkle a few caraway-seeds into the mixture, work it till quite smooth, then turn it out on a floured-table and roll it out as thin as possible. With a round tin-cutter one and one-half inches in diameter, cut some biscuits out of the flat of paste. Put the biscuits on a buttered baking-sheet, brush the tops over with beaten white of egg, dust some powdered-sugar over and bake in a quick oven for ten or twelve minutes. When cold, take them off the baking-sheet, and serve in a glass dish. Keep them in a biscuit-tin in a dry place.
A thin, sweet, egg-rich wafer of the seed-cake family, written in the shorthand of a professional kitchen. Two things need attention before you start: the wine measure and the wetness of the paste.
- A wineglassfulIn period cookery writing this is about 2 fluid ounces, a quarter cup. A fortified wine — sherry, Madeira, marsala — gives the flavour the recipe is reaching for; a dry table wine largely disappears behind the sugar and caraway.
- Crushed sugarSugar broken down from the loaf, roughly the fineness of modern granulated or caster sugar. Caster is the closer match and creams more smoothly with the warmed butter.
- The paste will be slackFour whole eggs against 8 oz flour makes something much closer to a thick batter than a rollable dough. Expect to chill it hard, and to work with well-floured hands and board, or to add flour until it will take a rolling pin at all.
- A quick ovenRoughly 400-450F in the usual modern equivalents. At that heat, thin 1.5-inch rounds are done at the low end of the stated time; start checking at eight minutes and pull them when the edges colour, since the sugar on top burns quickly.
- Butter only slightly warmedWarm enough to cream, not melted. Melted butter will not hold air with the sugar and eggs, and the biscuits spread into lace instead of holding their cut edge.
- Caraway"A few" means a light scatter — roughly a teaspoon for this quantity. Caraway was a very common flavouring in English sweet baking and reads as strongly savoury to modern palates; halve it if you are unsure.
- Egg white and sugar glazeBrush thinly. A heavy coat of white plus powdered sugar sets into a meringue crust that can lift off the biscuit as it cools.
- Lifting and storingThe instruction to leave them on the sheet until cold is not optional — hot, they tear. Rolled as thin as the recipe asks and cut at 1.5 inches, this quantity makes a very large number of biscuits. An airtight tin keeps them crisp; they go soft in humidity within a day or two otherwise.
Oscar Tschirky, maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria, put his name to a large compendium in 1896 that gathered restaurant practice alongside plainer household cookery, and this is squarely from the plainer side. "Biscuit" here is used in the older British sense of a small dry baked sweet, not an American quick bread, and the pairing of wine and caraway in a thin crisp wafer descends from the seed cakes and caraway comfits that had been standard English baking for centuries. The recipe ends by directing them to a glass dish — a serving piece for the table, not the kitchen. The instruction to store them in a tin in a dry place reflects a kitchen with no reliable way to control humidity.