Home › Pastries › Dessert Biscuits
Dessert Biscuits
1 cupful confectioners' sugar 1 cupful Crisco 1 cupful flour 5 whites of eggs ½ teaspoonful vanilla extract 1 teaspoonful salt Cream Crisco and gradually add sugar, mix thoroughly, and incor- Cream Crisco and gradually add porate, one by one, whites of eggs. Now add flour, salt, and vanilla. Mix well, then place in small, long heaps on a Criscoed tin. Bake in cool oven to pale brown color.
Sufficient for sixty biscuits.
Breads, etc.
A plain shortening-and-egg-white batter piped into fingers, closely related to the langue de chat. The whole thing hinges on adding the whites slowly enough that the creamed fat does not break.
- CriscoAll-vegetable hydrogenated shortening, still sold under the same name though reformulated over the years to cut trans fats. An equal weight of butter gives better flavour and more spread; modern shortening holds its shape more.
- "Cool oven"Period oven tables put a cool or slow oven at roughly 250-300F. The recipe asks for baking only to a pale brown, so these should dry out and take the barest colour.
- Adding the whitesFive whites into one cup of fat is a lot of liquid. Add them literally one at a time and beat until each is fully absorbed before the next, or the batter will separate. Room-temperature whites help.
- The saltA full teaspoon in a batch this size reads as heavy by modern taste. Half that is plenty unless you are using unsalted butter in place of the shortening.
- Confectioners' sugarFinely powdered sugar, by this period often cut with a little starch. It blends into the fat without grittiness, which may be why granulated is not called for.
- Shaping"small, long heaps" suggests short fingers of batter; the recipe does not give a length or method, so spoon or pipe them. Leave room between them, as a batter this soft will spread as it sets.
- Yield and storageSixty small biscuits from this quantity is realistic if you keep them to two inches. They crisp as they cool and keep about a week in a tin, but go soft in humidity.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with a product nobody had asked for: a solid white fat made from cottonseed oil by hydrogenation, introduced in 1911. The book's strategy was to show shortening doing everything butter and lard did, and delicate work like these dessert biscuits made the point most forcefully -- if the new fat could carry a pale, fine-grained tea biscuit, it could handle anything. The biscuit itself is older than the fat: a thin, finger-shaped egg-white cookie of this type appears across nineteenth-century European baking, generally traced to the French langue de chat, and was a standard accompaniment to ices and creams.