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Wine Finger Biscuits
Warm two ounces of butter, and beat it to a cream, with two tablespoonfuls of caster-sugar and one tablespoonful of orange-sugar; add one wineglassful of Madeira wine and a little salt, then stir eight ounces of flour in the mixture, and work till smooth. Dust some flour over the table, and roll the paste out very thin; cut it into long thin fingers, which prick all over with a fork. Dust some flour over a baking-sheet, arrange the biscuits on it, and bake in a moderately brisk oven. Serve on a glass dish. The biscuits should be kept perfectly dry in baking-tins.
A thin, crisp wine biscuit with no leavening and no eggs — closer to a shortbread cracker than a cookie. The wine is both the liquid and the flavour, so the dough will feel stiffer and drier than a modern cookie dough; resist adding water.
- Weights, not cupsTwo ounces of butter is 4 tablespoons; eight ounces of flour is about 1¾ cups spooned and levelled. Weighing gives a far more reliable dough here, since the only liquid is a fixed measure of wine.
- A wineglassfulIn period cookbooks this is a standard measure of about 2 fluid ounces (¼ cup), not the capacity of a modern stemmed glass. Overshooting turns a rollable paste into a batter.
- Caster-sugarSuperfine sugar, sold as caster or baker's sugar. Ordinary granulated works but dissolves less readily into cold-ish creamed butter; a few seconds in a food processor makes your own.
- Orange-sugarSugar rubbed hard against the zest of an orange until it is damp and fragrant, then dried — a nineteenth-century way of keeping citrus flavour on the shelf. A tablespoon of granulated sugar rubbed with the zest of half an orange stands in for it directly.
- Moderately brisk ovenBetween moderate and quick: about 375–400°F. Thin, sugared, wine-wetted strips colour fast, so start checking at 7 or 8 minutes and pull them when the edges are pale gold.
- Roll very thin, and mean itThis is the hinge. At about 1/8 inch or less the biscuits shatter crisply; thicker and the wine flavour reads as raw and floury. Docking with a fork keeps them flat.
- Drying and storageThey finish crisping as they cool. The instruction to keep them "perfectly dry" in tins is practical advice — they are hygroscopic and go leathery in a humid kitchen or a plastic box; an airtight tin, fully cooled, is right.
- Yield and servingYield depends entirely on how thin you roll and how long you cut the fingers; a batch on eight ounces of flour makes several dozen. The recipe directs only that they be served on a glass dish.
Wine biscuits belong to a long European tradition of dry, barely sweet baked fingers served at the end of a meal with a glass of something fortified — the sort of thing that keeps in a tin for weeks and does not compete with the wine. Madeira in particular held its place on American sideboards well into the twentieth century, prized because it survived sea voyages and warm cellars that ruined other wines, and it turns up throughout hotel cookery of this period in sauces, jellies and baking alike. Oscar Tschirky, who came to the Waldorf as maître d'hôtel in 1893 and assembled this book around the hotel's kitchen practice, includes a good many such small dry biscuits. The word "biscuit" here is used in the British and hotel sense of a crisp baked wafer, not the American soft quick bread.