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Bachelor's Buttons
2 ozs. (4 tablespoonfuls) butter 3 ozs. (6 tablespoonfuls) sugar ½ teaspoonful rose extract I well beaten egg 5 ozs. (1¼ cups) flour Cream the butter with the sugar; then add the rose extract, the egg and the flour. Knead on a floured baking board, roll out and cut with a small cutter. Place on a buttered tin, sprinkle over with sugar, and bake in a moderate oven until ready.
These biscuits are often served at afternoon tea.
They are fine for the lunch box.
Bachelor's Buttons is the quaint name for tiny old-fashioned English cookies. "Philpy" is a Southern bread containing rice and cornmeal १७ "Parliaments are cakes made and sold in Scotland when Parliament was held in Edinburgh "Siamese Twins" is the name of double cream puffs.
After the cakes are baked they are glazed over with fruit glacé and decorated with whipped cream Cakes
A plain creamed-butter cookie dough with rose flavouring, rolled thin and cut small. The only real difficulties are the flavouring strength and the instruction to bake "until ready".
- Weights and their conversionsThe book's own bracketed equivalents are workable: 2 oz butter (4 tablespoons, half a stick), 3 oz sugar (about 6 tablespoons), 5 oz flour (garbled in the text as "11/4 cups", meaning 1¼ cups). Weigh the flour if you can; 5 oz is on the low side of a modern 1¼ cups and the dough should be firm but not dry.
- Rose extract is not rosewaterA teaspoon and a half of extract would be overwhelming with a modern concentrated rose flavouring. Start with ¼ teaspoon of rose extract, tasting as you go, or substitute 1 tablespoon of rosewater and hold back a spoonful of flour to compensate for the liquid.
- A moderate ovenAbout 350F (350-375F). The cookies are small and thin, so watch the edges rather than the clock.
- "Until ready"For rounds cut at about 1½ inches and rolled ⅛ inch thick, that is 10 to 12 minutes: set, pale gold at the rim, still blond on top. These are meant to stay light-coloured, so pull them before they brown across the surface.
- Chill before rollingThe dough is soft from creaming and will stick and tear on the board. Half an hour in the refrigerator, wrapped, makes it roll cleanly and keeps the cut shapes round in the oven.
- The sugar sprinkleScatter it on the cut rounds just before they go in, while the surface is still tacky. The book specifies only 'sugar', which most likely means granulated; coarse sugar gives a better crunch and does not dissolve into the surface.
- Baking tin"A buttered tin" is a flat baking sheet. Parchment does the job with less risk of the sugared undersides catching.
- YieldAbout two dozen small cookies. They keep a week in a tin and firm up as they cool; the original notes they are fine for the lunch box.
- Ignore the tail of the entryEverything after "They are fine for the lunch box" is a run of unrelated glossary notes on Philpy, Parliaments and Siamese Twins that the typesetting has run into this recipe. None of it belongs to the method.
Bachelor's buttons are an old English small cake or biscuit, named by tradition for the button-like shape and for the flower of the same name; the term was applied loosely in nineteenth-century cookery books to several round, coin-sized sweets, some plain and some studded with currants or dropped rather than rolled. Rose flavouring here reflects an older English sweet-kitchen habit: rosewater was a common aromatic in cakes and creams before vanilla became cheap and widely available, and it persisted in this sort of tea biscuit. The little glossary jottings on Philpy, Parliaments and Siamese Twins have collided with the end of the instructions.