So, I have completed another section of English Food! The Biscuits section of the Teatime chapter was quite short with only
nine relatively easy recipes; yet it has taken me all this time to bake them!
That said, it’s a surprise that it is so
short, as there is a great tradition of biscuit-making with many diverse
regional recipes. Jane reckoned that biscuits are one of the few successes of
the manufacturing industry, meaning folk are more reluctant to bake them today.
She’s probably right, and I expect it is why the section is so short.
Grasmere Gingerbread II
Biscuits come in essentially two forms in
Britain: sweet and savoury, the latter more often called crackers. They all
have a common ancestor: the ship’s biscuit. A hard, dry rusk that could survive
long journeys at sea without spoiling. They were boring, but provided
sustenance, often crumbled into broth or hot drinks; our love today for dunking
our biscuits into tea and coffee is a throwback to this.
The original biscuits were made from
breadcrumbs, reformed and baked in cooling bread ovens (biscuit literally means
‘twice-baked’). Biscuits began to get rather more interesting during the times
of the Crusades where the laying down of the spice trading routes, brought not
only spices but also sugar (then considered a spice) to Britain. More upmarket biscuits
were a mixture of honey and fresh breadcrumbs and were highly-spiced – a
Mediæval recipe is included in the book and very good it is too.
But it is descendants of the hard and dry
ship’s biscuits that have survived –
Grasmere gingerbread, shortbread, digestives, Rich Tea, Hob Nobs, cream
crackers, Ritz crackers, Nice biscuits are all based on them! The list is
almost endless.
Cheese and Oat Biscuits
Perhaps it is not the most exciting part of
the book, but I there are some real gems in here. I have used Jane’s recipes for Shortcakes
and Grasmere
Gingerbread since I first started The
Buttery, and the excellent Brandy
Snaps were used as part of the dessert in my very first pop-up
restaurant. I’ve not found better recipes to this day.
Biscuits are much easier to make than cakes
or breads, so if you haven’t done much baking, they are probably a good place
to start – though they do have to be watched as they do catch easily.
Making Brandy Snaps
All the recipes in the section are listed
below as they appear in the book with hyperlinks and the score I gave them out
of ten. The section scores an average of 7.6, the second best mean score so
far; the recipes were perhaps not particularly exciting but they were reliable
#174
Grasmere Gingerbread I 7.5/10
#308
Walnut Biscuits 7/10
#377
Brandy Snaps 9/10
