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Gimblets
2 ozs. (4 tablespoonfuls) sugar 3 ozs. (6 tablespoonfuls) butter 1/2 lemon 1 egg Mix the flour and sugar together, rub the but- Cakes ter into them and add the grated lemon rind.
Lay aside in a cool place for thirty minutes. Roll out about one-fourth inch thick. Cut out with a small doughnut cutter, brush over with the egg well beaten, lay on a buttered tin, and bake in a quick oven.
A short rubbed-in lemon biscuit, ring-shaped, from the era when a cook was trusted to judge quantities. One key figure has dropped out of the printed ingredient list, so read the notes before you start.
- The missing flourThe method says to mix the flour and sugar, but no flour quantity survives in this text. For a rubbed-in dough with 3 oz butter and 2 oz sugar, roughly 6-8 oz (about 1 1/2 cups) is the usual proportion for a shortbread-type biscuit that will roll and hold a cut edge; the original does not say, so treat this as a reconstruction rather than the author's figure.
- Ounces as givenThe book helpfully translates its own weights: 2 oz sugar is 4 tablespoons, 3 oz butter is 6 tablespoons (three-quarters of a stick). The butter should be cool and firm so it rubs into crumbs rather than smearing.
- "A quick oven"The book gives no temperature; the term is usually read as somewhere around 400-450F. For thin sweet biscuits, sit at the low end and watch them: 8-12 minutes should be enough, and the egg glaze will colour well before the dough dries out.
- Half a lemonOnly the grated rind is used, and only from half a fruit -- roughly a teaspoon of zest. Take the yellow only; the white pith turns the flavour bitter in a biscuit this plain.
- The restChilling for thirty minutes before rolling is not optional in a dough this high in butter -- it firms the fat so the rings keep their hole and their shape. Roll on a lightly floured surface to a true quarter inch.
- The cutterA "small doughnut cutter" gives the ring shape the name depends on. Two plain round cutters, about 2 inches and 3/4 inch, do the same job.
- Egg washOne beaten egg is far more than these need. Brush thinly; pooled egg bakes to a leathery skin and drips off the edges onto the tin.
- YieldWith about 7 oz of flour, expect roughly 18-24 rings at 2 inches. They should keep reasonably well in a tin.
Gimblets are ring-shaped biscuits, and the name is generally traced to the same root as gimlet, the small boring tool that cuts a round hole -- the shape is the whole point of the thing. Related ring biscuits appear across Europe under cognate names, including the French gimblettes associated with the south, and English cookery books of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries carry them alongside jumbles and other stiff-dough sweets made to be cut, glazed and stored. In such books dessert, cake and biscuit were one continuous territory, and the boundaries between them were loosely drawn.