Nic-Nacs for a Nic-Nac?

Yesterday’s source - The Complete Bread, Cake, and Cracker Baker, J. Thompson Gill, (Chicago, 1881) – taught me something new (two things actually), which is always fun. The introductory pages are not wildly exciting either in content or style, but they did include this description:

‘Nic-Nacs is a name given to hard sweet biscuits or crackers, to distinguish them from other. As their name implies, they are small, and are a combination of fancy shapes. They were first made in London.’

Naturally, as I had never heard of these biscuits, I wanted to know more. Equally naturally, the Oxford English Dictionary was my first step on the road to enlightenment. The primary spelling was ‘knick-knack’, and the first definition was ‘A petty trick, sleight, artifice, subterfuge’. An extended usage can refer to ‘a light, dainty article of furniture, dress, or food; any curious or pleasing trifle more for ornament than use’ – which explains our biscuits, I suppose.

What delighted me even more was the subsequent usage of ‘nick-nack’ to refer to ‘A feast or social meal to which each guest contributes in kind.’ A ‘pot-luck’ or ‘bring a plate’ meal , in other words. The supporting quotation for this use is about 1777, showing us that this sort of community catering has been happening for well over two hundred years. The sound is perilously close to ‘pic-nic’ too, isn’t it (although I am not sure if that is at all relevant to anything)?

So that you can take some nic-nacs to your next nic-nac, I give you two very different recipes from the book. Note that the industrial quantities specified are because the book was meant for commercial bakers – which also explains the minimalist instructions.

I love it that there was something called a nic-nac cutter too.

Nic-Nacs (1)
16 lb flour
1 ½ ozs soda
½ oz tartaric acid
2 ½ lb sugar
1 ¼ lb lard or butter
½ gal sour milk
Oil lemon to flavor.
Cut with nic-nac cutters.

Nic-Nacs (2)
2 lbs flour
2 lb butter
4 oz fine loaf sugar.
Make into a stiff paste with milk; roll out thin and cut into fancy shapes; brush with a little milk; bake in a quick oven; when done, glace with a brush dipped in egg.

Quotation for the Day.

Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
Carl Sandburg

Desserts, Part 2.

I am at the beach having fun with the family, so you will, I am sure, excuse the short posts. I don’t want to leave the dessert theme of yesterday’s story - and perhaps may stay with it all week – so if you have a pudding phobia, please return in a few days.

I am often intrigued by what a particular country considers characteristic of another in the culinary sphere – an impression or opinion which may bear little relation to reality, but nevertheless influences the naming of dishes. Perhaps I can find something to illustrate my point in International dessert and pastry specialties of the world famous chefs, United States, Canada, Europe (Los Angeles, 1913) ?

First, a generic recipe for biscuit paste:


Biscuit Paste.
Beat ten eggs firm and smooth and add gradually one pound of sifted powdered sugar; grate peel of one lemon and beat the mixture very hard. Then take one-half pound of potato flour or fine wheat flour and stir it in lightly and slowly. It must be baked immediately. Have a very thin tin ready to bake. No other cakes require so much care in baking; have the oven even and very hot top and bottom; sprinkle with grated loaf sugar before putting in the oven.

Now, for the distinctive fillings. Can someone please hazard a guess as to what suggests ‘Siam’, Bohemia, or Marseille in the following fillings?

Le Siamois.
Two pomponet shells filled with cream.


Bohemienne Caracas.
Two shells, oval shaped, made of Berlin paste filled with cream of chestnuts with maraschino.


La Marseillaise.
Made of chocolat biscuit filled with chocolate cream of butter; decorated with half an almond.

At a Sicilian Coffee House.

I have been hoarding today’s little gem for some time. The wait has been worth it, for there is always some extra value when the story can begin with the intriguing phrase ‘On This Day.’

The bill of fare of a coffeehouse in Palermo on this day in 1806 was considered interesting enough to be described in The Times some months later.

In the Coffeehouse of M.Francis Geraci in Centorinara’s street num. 98, at Palermo, a Company of four people served with three dishes of meat and poultry eight dishes of sausage, cheese, olives, fruits, greens, &c. for desert, bread, and two bottles of wine, will pay six dollars.

If the people were more than the said four, every person exceeding that number will pay one dollar.

A company of four people served with six dishes of Meat & poultry, sixteen dishes of sausage, cheese, olives &c, for deserts, bread, two bottles of wine, a dish of sweet-meats, ice, and coffee, will pay two dollars.

If the company would have more things than the above-mentioned, they will pay according to the following prices.

Lionell-wine, Port-wine, Canaries-wine, Malaga-wine &c half a Dollar for every bottle.

Moscato-wine & Mulvassi-wine (these are sweet wines) two shillings a bottle.

A large Cup of Cofee with milk & sugar, six pence.

A little cup of coffee with sugar, one penny.

A Glass of ice of any kind six pence.

Biscuits half a penny each.

A Dish of sausage one Shilling.

A Bottle of Rosolio of Pugioli, of several kinds, half a Dollar.

A small bottle of Rosolio of the same Geraci one shilling.

Those people then, which will have a dinner as before has been mentioned, must advise the said Geraci at least one hour before, in order that he could dress it, & they must leave some money, in order that in case, they should miss their engagement, the said money will remain to Geraci to amend for the loss he will suffer for the dinner left him.

                    Palermo, Sicily, Sept. 10, 1806

Italian Biscuit.
Beat the whites of nine eggs to a froth, then put in the yolks and beat them; add a pound and a half of fine sugar, beaten and sifted, and a pound and a half of fine flour, putting in a little at a time, till it is all in; beat it well for an hour, drop it on wafer paper, with a few caraway comfits on the top; shake a little sugar over it, and bake it in a quick oven; for if it is slow, they will run.
Every Woman Her Own House-keeper: or, the ladies’ library … by John Perkins,

(Note – In 1806, the instruction to ‘beat it all well for an hour’ meant ‘beat by hand’!)

If you are keen to know more about Sicilian food, I can do no better than refer you to my friend Marisa's blog, All Things Sicilian and More.

Quotation for the Day.

A tavola non si invecchia (You don't age while seated for a meal.)
Italian proverb.

Digestive biscuits.

We had ‘dyspepsia bread’ on Friday, so why not ‘digestive biscuits’ today? My impression was that digestive biscuits were particularly English, in comparison to the unequivocally American ‘dyspepsia bread.’ I thought I should know, being reared in the North of England where a digestive biscuit is an almost compulsory accompaniment to a cuppa. It appears though, that ‘digestive biscuits’ began to be mentioned with increasing frequency in both the USA and England by the 1840’s, and by the 1860’s, according to one source, were becoming ‘fashionable’.

It seems that my impression of an English origin can be blamed squarely on Messrs. Huntley and Palmer and Messrs. McVitie, who were responsible for the modern commercial product. These very popular biscuits – renamed ‘sweetmeal biscuits’ in the 1950’s - are, however, a far cry from the original ‘digestive biscuits.’

Wikipedia claims that the term ‘digestive’ is derived from the belief that the biscuits had antacid properties due to the use of sodium bicarbonate when they were first developed. Sorry, Wikipedia - the earliest digestive biscuits had no soda in them at all. They were leavened with yeast if they were leavened at all. They were frighteningly ‘healthy’ unsweetened brown discs, named ‘digestive’ with the same rationale as ‘dyspepsia’ bread was named – because, being excruciatingly plain, they were good (that is, they were not bad) for the digestion.

I give you a couple of terrifyingly healthy-sounding nineteenth century digestive biscuits, so that you may go down on your knees in thanks to the commercial biscuit manufacturers who gave us the ‘sweet-meal’ chocolate-coated versions which you can enjoy today.

Brown Digestive Biscuits.
Take equal parts of fine wheaten flour and meal, and mix them together. To 5 quarts of liquor, use 2 ½ lbs of butter, and 2 oz. of German yeast. Mix the whole into dough as directed for “butters”. When it has proved, make into biscuits as captains’, and bake in a sound oven. They will bake well after captains’ and Abernethy’s.
Complete Bread and Gingerbread Baker’s Assistant, London, 1854

Brown Bread Hard Biscuits.
Ingredients: 1 ¼ lb of brown wheaten flour, 1 oz. of fresh butter, a teaspoonful of salt, and rather better than ½ pint of water. Proceed as for Thick Captain’s, No. 323*. These are biscuits are also called digestive biscuits.
*Spread out the flour on the slab with a hollow in the centre, add the butter dissolved in the milk just tepid, mix, and vigorously work all together into a stiff compact smooth paste; this must be well-worked for ten minutes by pressing and jagging it with a rolling pin held in both hands; (bakers have a machine made on purpose, with which they achieve this hard work with comparative ease). You then wrap the biscuit paste in a napkin, and allow it to rest in a comparatively warm place for an hour: and, at the end of that time, divide it into twelve equal parts, mould them into balls with your hands on the floured slab, roll them out to the size of small saucers, prick them all over with a fork, bake on a floured baking-plate, in rather sharp heat.
The Royal English and Foreign Confectioner (1862)

Quotation for the Day.

“How can a society that exists on instant mashed potatoes, packaged cake mixes, frozen dinners, and instant cameras teach patience to its young?”
Paul Sweeney

Battles and Biscuits.

Sometimes I give you an ‘on this day’ story which has a food angle, but the problem with giving you the story on the actual day is that it gives you no time to prepare a commemorative food in advance. I intend to remedy that glitch today by giving you an ‘on the morrow’ story.

Dishes are, as we have found out repeatedly, often named for famous events as well as for famous people. The opposite does occur too, and a historic event is given a foodie name. We have had stories about the Pastry War and the Battle of the Herrings, for example, in previous posts.

Tomorrow, August 7, is the anniversary of The Battle of the Ford of the Biscuit – an event that took place early in the history of the Irish rebellion against English rule.

In February 1594, at the beginning of what became known as the Nine Year’s War, an English army captured and garrisoned the Ulster stronghold of Eniskillen Castle. The Irish response was to place the garrison under siege. On August 7 the advancing English relief forces were ambushed at the Arney River by Irish rebels led by the famous Hugh Maguire, Lord of Fermagh, and leader of the Maguire clan. The English were well and truly routed, and the sight of English rations floating down the bloody river gave the event the name of the ‘Battle of the Ford of the Biscuit.’

The ‘biscuits’ were of course not Gingernuts or Oreos or Chocolate Digestives, but the traditional military campaign ration of ‘hardtack’ (or sea-biscuit, in the case of the navy). You can find a story about hardtack on the now-defunct Companion to the Old Foodie site, here. The recipe has remained unchanged for centuries – take flour and water (and salt, if you wish), make a paste, roll it thin, and bake it very hard so that it will keep for many years. It was most certainly NOT like the following biscuit, in spite of its name.

Sea-biscuit – Biscuit de Mer.
Take half a pound of sugar and half a pound of flour, mix in a bason with a little lemon grate and four eggs; mix them with a spatula to make rather a liquid paste, but if too much so add flour and sugar, or if too firm, add an egg: the cases must be the size of half a sheet of paper folded in, with the sides much lower than those made for the gros biscuit à couper: put the pâte into these cases, and set them in a hotter oven than for ordinary biscuit; when enough, take them out, and cut them in pieces the length and thickness of the little finger, and put them upon a copper leaf, on the side that has been cut, that all sides may be equally coloured.
The Art of French Cookery, Antoine Beauvilliers, 1827

Quotation for the Day.
You had to eat with all your mind on the food...and how good it tasted, that
black bread!
A. Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

Food as Propaganda.

Unravelling urban myth from real history is a constant challenge, whatever the topic, isn’t it? The problem is, that if a sufficiently magical explanation is repeated often enough (an easy thing, nowadays, thanks to the Internet), it becomes indistinguishable from truth, doesn’t it? I make no claim to have unravelled the real story in today’s story – I haven’t spent nearly enough time on it, for starters – but I hope you find it interesting anyway.

The repeated factoid that intrigued me this week was the statement that ‘German Biscuits’ were renamed ‘Empire Biscuits’ in Britain as anti-German sentiment escalated in the prelude to World War II. This linguistic jingoism of this period has been a previous topic on this blog, when we considered the patriotic name-changes of sauerkraut to ‘liberty cabbage’, hamburgers to ‘liberty steak’, frankfurters to‘hot dogs’, and even ‘sauce allemande’ to ‘sauce blonde’. Then, in 2003, French fries and French toast briefly became ‘freedom fries’ and ‘freedom toast’ in the House of Representatives cafeteria, in response to French opposition to American invasion of Iraq. Other countries have done the same thing – just to name a couple: supposedly in Germany in WW II, ‘Norwegian sardines’ briefly became ‘Hindenburg Sardines’, and during the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoon controversy in 2006, some groups in Iran wanted ‘Danish pastry to be renamed ‘Roses of the Prophet Muhammad.’

I had not previously heard the German biscuit name change theory, but it seems like a nice one to add to the list. I found many recipes for German biscuits, and a paltry few (much later) recipes for Empire biscuits, but I found no clear reference that commented on an intentional name change for patriotic reasons.

So - are German biscuits and Empire biscuits indeed the same thing? Recipes for German biscuits are common in cookbooks from the early nineteenth century, and they seem to fall into two broad groups. One is a spiced biscuit, reminiscent of one type of gingerbread. The other is a plain biscuit, with jam, or icing, or both. This latter sort is also called a ‘Linzer biscuit’ and it is clearly a bastard descendant of the Austrian (not German) ‘Linzertorte.’ The Linzertorte is a wonderful tart made from pastry which includes ground almonds or hazelnuts, with a jam filling, and a lattice top. It claims a heritage dating back to at least the seventeenth century in Austria. It seems that this last version is the one which became the Empire biscuit (or, alternatively, the ‘Belgian biscuit.’)

Mentions of the ‘Empire biscuit’ do seem to appear around about the time in question, but, rather oddly, are referred to as a specialty of Scotland. They consist of a couple of plain sweet biscuits sandwiched together with jam, and topped with white icing and a glace cherry.

That something as apparently innocuous as the name of a biscuit can inflame patriotic passions is demonstrated in the following article from the Washington Post in October 1933.

“GERMAN” BISCUITS WRECK PARIS CAFE.

PATRON READS EDINBURGH BRAND “HINDENBURG.”

Paris, Oct. 7. Uproar ensued at the Valenciennes railway station today when a customer in the buffet asserted the biscuits he was eating were stamped “Hindenberg.”

The crowd pulled down the trays and trampled them on the ground until the police rushed in. The manager sued the customer for the lost case of biscuits.

In court, the judge reserved his finding after the manager produced samples of the biscuits. All were stamped “Made in Edinburgh.”

I give you a selection of German biscuits from which to take your pick:


German Biscuits.
Take cloves, cinnamon, corianders, nutmeg, of each a quarter of an ounce, and pound and sift them (or the essence of those spices will answer the same purpose); two ounces of preserved lemon peel, and one pound of sweet almonds cut into fine prawlings [as for pralines]; mix these ingredients with twenty four eggs, and five pounds of sugar, and as much flour as will make it of a malleable paste. Roll it out into squares, lozenges, ovals, or any other shape; when baked put on them an iceing of chocolate &c. to your taste.
The Italian Confectioner, William Alexis Jarrin, (London, England, 1829)


German Biscuits.
Rub in a quarter of a pound of butter amongst half a pound of flour, one quarter of a pound of sugar, a little carbonate of soda; moisten with one egg, and season with a few drops of essence of bitter almonds; put it in small bits on a buttered tin as rough as possible. Bake in a slow oven.
The Practice of Cookery and Pastry, I. Williamson, (Edinburgh, Scotland, 1862)

German Biscuits.
Whisk two eggs thoroughly, and stir into them half a pound of sifted loaf sugar. Beat them for twenty minutes, then add the peel of a small lemon, grated, two dessert-spoonfuls of cream, and, gradually, half a pound of fine flour. Mix all well together, roll the pastry out very thin, stamp it, with an ordinary pastry-cutter, into different shapes, and bake in buttered tins, in a quick oven, till light and coloured, which will be in about seven or eight minutes. Probable cost, 6d.
Cassell’s Dictionary of Cookery, (London, England, ca. 1870)

German Biscuits.
One cupful each of flour, ground rice, and sugar, 2 oz. butter, two eggs, half a packet mixed spice, one teaspoonful of soda, and two of cream of tartar. Roll out and cut into rounds, and when baked stick two together with jam. Put icing on top, made as below:- To the white of an egg beaten to a stiff froth add ¼ lb powdered sugar, spread on the biscuits, and place in a cool oven for a minute or two to dry.
The Leeds Mercury (Leeds, England), June 29, 1895

I finally found a recipe for Empire Biscuits – in an American newspaper, but apparently from an English contributor.

Empire Biscuits (Cookies)
You will need the following ingredients:
½ lb butter (or oleo)
¾ C sugar
2 eggs beaten slightly
3 C flour
1 t. soda
1 t. Cream of tartar
Cream shortening and sugar together, add eggs, then dry ingredients sifted together. Mix well.
Roll very thin, 1/8 to ¼ inch thick. Cut with cookie cutter.
Spread one-half of the cookies with raspberry jam or other tart jam. Place on second cookie sandwich fashion.
Bake10 minutes in slow oven 350 degrees.
Mrs Wharton warns that these cookies must be watched carefully so they don’t brown.
When cool, ice with confectioners sugar icing. Place a chip of cherry in the center of each cookie. Makes 60 double cookies.
Chronicle Telegram (Ohio) Dec 17, 1954

Quotation for the Day.

How can one make friends without exquisite dishes! It is mainly through the table that one governs!
Jean-Jacques Regis de Cambaceres.