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King Henry's Shoestrings
1/4 lb. (1 cup) flour I oz. (2 tablespoonfuls) butter 1½ ozs. (3 tablespoonfuls) sugar 1/4 pint (1/2 cup) milk 4 yolks of eggs 3 whites of eggs 1/4 pint (1/2 cup) ground almonds I lemon Sieve the flour into a pan, rub the butter into it, add the sugar, strained juice of the lemon and the milk. When well mixed stir over the fire for about ten minutes or, till the batter comes easily from the sides of the saucepan. Remove from the fire and add the yolks of the eggs and the almonds. Mix and allow to cool. Then add the stiffly beaten whites of the eggs. Spread the batter out on a buttered tin. Dredge plenty of sugar over, bake in a moderate oven for ten minutes, cut it out in strips and serve hot or cold. "Lobs-Lie-by-the-Fire " made of are scones sour milk "Cat's Tongues" are delicious tea cakes that are great favorites in Continental Europe "Pikelets" are old-fashioned English breakfast hot cakes. They are raised with yeast, cooked on a greased griddle and served hot with butter Cakes
A cooked flour panada enriched with almonds and eggs, baked flat and cut into strips — closer to a stiff baked batter than to a pudding in the modern sense. Two things in the printed text need sorting out before you start.
- The sugar quantityThe printed page gives 1½ ozs. (3 tablespoonfuls) sugar, which is what our text now reads. That is a modest amount, in keeping with the flour-and-almond base, and the sugar dredged over before baking adds the rest of the sweetness.
- Metric and cup equivalents1/4 lb flour is 115 g; 1 oz butter is 30 g. The book's own gloss of 1/4 pint as 1/2 cup treats it as 4 fl oz, though an imperial 1/4 pint is 5 fl oz (about 140 ml). Use 120 ml milk and add a splash more only if the batter is unworkably stiff.
- Ground almonds by volume1/2 cup ground almonds is about 50 g of almond flour or finely ground blanched almonds. Nut flours pack unevenly, so weigh if you can.
- "A moderate oven"350F / 175C. Ten minutes is right only if the batter is spread thin — about 1/4 inch on a buttered baking sheet or Swiss roll tin. Thicker than that and it will need 18-20 minutes and will not stay crisp.
- The hinge: cook the panada properlyThe ten minutes over the fire is not a formality. Stir constantly until the paste pulls cleanly away from the pan sides and leaves a film on the base, as for choux. Undercook it and the flour tastes raw and the strips slump.
- Cool before the whites go inAdd the yolks off the heat, then let the mixture cool to barely warm. Folded into a hot paste the beaten whites collapse and you lose the lift that makes the strips light.
- Lemon juice into milkThe strained juice of a whole lemon will thicken the milk noticeably. That is expected here, but add it with the milk and mix at once rather than letting it stand.
- Cutting and yieldCut into narrow shoestrings while still hot, straight on the tin, with a long knife or pizza wheel; once cold the sugared surface shatters. One tin gives four to six servings as a tea or dessert sweet.
- The trailing lines are not part of this recipeThe notes on Lobs-Lie-by-the-Fire, Cat's Tongues and Pikelets are stray glossary entries that have run on from elsewhere in the book. Ignore them when making the shoestrings.
The name is not attached to any documented historical dish, and no contemporary evidence links it to Henry VIII or Henry V; fanciful regal or storybook titles for flat cakes and fried strips were common in books of this kind. What is genuinely old is the method -- a flour-and-milk paste dried out over the fire, then loosened with egg yolks and lifted with beaten whites, the same family of cooked batters that produces choux paste, and related to the almond-thickened puddings of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English cookery, where ground almonds could do work later given to cornflour or custard powder. The stray glossary lines that follow give Lobs-Lie-by-the-Fire as sour-milk scones and Cat's Tongues as the thin Continental tea biscuit.