Toad-in-a-Hole Biscuits and Friends

Some English biscuits from a recipe book published in the year of the French Revolution. Left: Toad in a Hole Biscuits, Top: Judge's Biscuits, Right: Fine Almond Faggots, Bottom: Yarmouth Biscuits

Biscuits have been on my mind for some time. Last week food writer and television cook Nigel Slater came to my kitchen to find out about how biscuits were made in Britain before they were mass-produced in factories. Nigel is the presenter of a programme on biscuits which will air on the BBC later this year. We made seventeenth century Shrewsbury Cakes from a recipe collected by John Evelyn and I introduced him to a number of forgotten English biscuits that once graced the dessert tables of the Georgian nobility. Most of these I made from recipes in Frederick Nutt's The Complete Confectioner (London: 1789). These luxury items, designed for accompanying wine rather than tea, are so much nicer than a lot of the manufactured biscuits consumed in Britain today They are also very easy to make. So I have appended some of Nutt's recipes at the end of this article. 

My all time favourites are his toad-in-a-hole biscuits, whose name almost certainly arose because of their similarity to the popular Georgian supper dish toad-in-a-hole. This cheap and cheerful delicacy was originally made by covering pieces of meat, usually beef, in a milk, egg and flour batter and baking it in the oven. The earliest printed recipe for the savoury toad-in-a-hole is in Richard Briggs, The English Art of Cookery (London: 1788) published only a year before Nutt's biscuit version. In the modern incarnation of the dish, the beef has been replaced with sausages. India Mandelkern, to my mind the foremost blogger on eighteenth century English food culture, has written a short, but fascinating essay on toad-in-hole, to which there is a link at the end of this posting.  

Toad-in-a-hole-biscuits were made from little rounds of almond paste into which one or two dried cherries were pushed before they were baked. Like the Yorkshire pudding batter used in the savoury dish, the almond paste rises as it bakes, enveloping the cherries, thus creating the miniature 'toad-in-a-holes'. Nutt's recipe calls for 'dried cherries'. What he means by this are syrup sweetened and candied cherries, not exactly the same as glacé cherries. I use dried morello cherries which work really well.

If my own favourite from the filming session was the toad-in-a-hole biscuit. Nigel Slater's was Nutt's 'Orange Biscuit', which he said was the most delicious biscuit he had eaten in his life. Tasting like a cumulus cloud lightly spread with marmalade, this fluffy, but incredibly crisp morsel dissolves on the tongue in micro-seconds. If you cannot read Mr Nutt's recipe in the photo below, I have appended a clearer version at the end of the posting.

Frederick Nutt's Orange Biscuits. Photo: Nigel Slater

One biscuit which originated in the early nineteenth century and remained popular for over a century was the Union Biscuit, designed originally to commemorate the Acts of Union of 1801. But why celebrate a political act with a biscuit? I cannot be sure, but I suspect that these biscuits were consumed with wine during the toasts at the end of a formal dinner. Toasts to the reigning monarch, Union etc. took place during the dessert course when biscuits were usually laid out with the other sweetmeats. These little biscuits pirnted with the word Union would have been perfect for nibbling with the sweet wines. They were still fashionable in the early twentieth century when Frederick Vine gave detailed instructions for making them in the second edition of his marvellous trade manual Biscuits for Bakers (London: 1906).

Union, Wine and some other patriotic friends

Vine not only explains the recipe, which is a very basic one, but the process of stamping them with the Union design. His full instructions are below. By 'volatile' he means ammonium bicarbonate, once known as sal volatile, or hartshorn, because it was formerly made by calcining stag antlers. At some point I will publish a detailed posting about volatile and other leavening agents.

Over many decades I have sought out quite a few of the biscuit prints and dockers formerly used by confectioners and bakers, but so far a Union Biscuit stamp has eluded me. However, I do own a remarkable biscuit roller which is carved with a total of fifteen different designs, among which is a Union stamp. Some of the other stamps on the roller are also patriotic. One, emblazoned with VR, dates the roller very definitely to the reign of Queen Victoria. There is also a royal crown, a shamrock of Ireland, a thistle of Scotland and a rose of England. Some of the other designs are decorative and represent ears of wheat, pineapples and a ship's anchor. One is engraved with the word WINE, indicating that it was for making a dessert biscuit to be consumed with a glass of wine.  

Frederick Vine gives five recipes for wine biscuits and has this to say on the subject,

'Almost all biscuits not made for special purposes are really wine biscuits; yet in almost every shop you will invariably find a special biscuit made and sold under this heading. Why it should be so, I know not; yet , being so it becomes my duty to direct your attention to the fact, and give a few special mixtures accordingly.'

What he is saying is that most biscuits were once made for consuming with wine. We now of course devour them more commonly with tea. Applying this information to the biscuits that my roller was used to produce makes a great deal of sense. Only one recipe mix was required to make the fifteen different biscuit designs, which I suspect were all intended to be used when toasting. The VR, the royal crown, the Union and the symbols of the constituent countries of the kingdom are all represented. During the nineteenth century the very large industrial biscuit manufacturers, such as Carrs, Huntley and Palmers, Peak Freans etc. produced many different stamped biscuits of this kind. Some like 'zoological biscuits' were moulded in the form of various animals for the delight no doubt of Victorian children, but all were made with the same basic recipe, usually along the lines of Vine's recipe for Union biscuits above. These enormous factories used mechanical rollers to produce their printed biscuits which were made by the million. Despite the competition from these big companies, small scale confectioners and bakers continued to make handcrafted biscuits using the old fashioned techniques described by Vine. However the biscuit roller was a step up from the biscuit stamp and I have had a great deal of fun using it to recreate these Victorian delights.

Twelve of the designs on the roller stamped into some biscuit paste. Note the symbolic flowers of Ireland, England and Scotland above. The pineapple  was a symbol much used for a confectioner's shop. The anchor represents the navy. The borders designs of the biscuits represent wheat straw and ears of corn. Although these biscuits can be trimmed down to size with a knife, I think it likely that originally a little rectangular tin cutter would have been used to cut them out more quickly.

Here are the recipes for the biscuits illustrated at the beginning of the posting. All are from Frederick Nutt, The Complete Confectioner (London: 1789). I suspect that some of them, like the fine almond faggots and orange biscuits, are Italian in origin. It is possible that Nutt learnt these from his master Domenico Negri, a confectioner from Turin who founded the Pot and Pineapple in Berkeley Square in the late 1750s. Because of the high sugar content, the orange biscuits blister and spread in the oven, but do not worry. When they are cool, just break off the ragged pieces round the edges and they will look good. The Yarmouth Biscuits are incredibly buttery. Delicious!


Toad-in-a-Hole Biscuits.

TAKE one pound of sweet, and one ounce and a half of bitter almonds, and pound them in a mortar very fine with water, then one pound and a quarter of Lisbon sugar, and mix it very well with the almonds: do not make it too thin, and remember there are no eggs in this; then put one sheet of paper on your wire, and some wafer paper on that, then take a spoon and make your biscuits round on the wafer paper, about the size of a half-crown piece; then put one or two dried cherries in the middle of them; and sift some powdered sugar over them, and put them in the oven, which must have a moderate heat, and when they come out, cut the wafer paper round them, but leave the paper at the bottom of them.

Judges Biscuits. 

TAKE six eggs and break them into a copper pan, yolks and whites together, whisk them well for about five minutes, mix half a pound of powdered sugar with the eggs, and whisk them for ten minutes, put as many carraway seeds as you think proper, and half a pound of sifted flour, mix it well with a wooden spoon, and put three papers on your plates ; then take a spoon and drop them on papers about the size of a crown piece, sift some powdered sugar over them, let them be rather thick in the middle, and the oven rather sharp and when they come out, cut them off the paper while hot.

Fine Almond Faggots.

CUT some sweet almonds in halves, put them and some whites of eggs in a bason together ; put a little powdered sugar, to make the almonds stick together, mix them well together in a bason ; put some wafer papers on your wire, make the almonds up in little heaps with your fingers, as big as you please ; sift a little powdered sugar over them, before you put them in the oven ; let them be a little brown, and then take them out, and cut the wafer paper off round them, that is ragged, and leave the wafer paper at the bottom of them.

Yarmouth Biscuits.

TAKE six ounces of currants, wash and pick them very clean, dry them well, rub a little flour among them to make them white, and put half a pound of powdered sugar with the currants upon a clean dresser, add twelve ounces of flour sifted, and half a pound of the best fresh butter you can get; break three eggs and mix all the ingredients together to become a paste that you can roll it on the dresser the thickness of an eighth part of an inch, and then cut them out either round or what shape you fancy.

N. B. Your oven must be rather hot, and put two or three sheets of paper under them, do not bake them too much, only just make them brown.

Orange Biscuits.

TAKE one pound of sweet almonds, pound them in a mortar very fine with whites of eggs ; take ten China oranges, rasp the rind off them very fine, and put it with the almonds ; add three pounds of powdered sugar, and mix. it well, if you find it too thick, put more whites of eggs to it and mix it well; then put two or three sheets of paper under, besides that you have put them on : let your oven have a moderate heat ; drop little round pieces of paste on your paper, about half as big as a nutmeg, and put them in the oven : let them have a fine brown, and take them off when cold.

N. B. Your oven must be rather hot, and put two or three sheets of paper under them, do not bake them too much, only just make them brown.

Please read India Mandelkern's great essay The Secret History of Toad-in-a-Hole

Battenburg Cake History Again!

Delving into the true history of our foods is always much more rewarding than blindly accepting the tired old clichés and myths that are often used to explain their origins. I have already in two earlier postings tried to unravel the complex history of the popular Battenburg Cake, but the more I look at this subject, the more puzzling it becomes. A popular theory about its origin tells us it was made to celebrate an important Victorian royal wedding in 1884. In a 2003 newspaper article, food historian Catherine Brown tells us,

'But there was nothing to compare with the German pastry cooks' sophisticated use of marzipan, colours, shapes, flavours and allegorical designs. The British were impressed. They tried their hand at the German techniques and some native pastry cooks became almost as good as the Germans. Such was their confidence that when Queen Victoria's granddaughter, Princess Victoria of Hesse-Darmstadt, married Prince Louis of Battenberg in 1884, it was decided that a celebration cake was required, in their own design of course, but appropriately German in style to celebrate the marriage. What else to call it but a Battenberg cake? It was to be unique: a cake to stun British cake-lovers. They took inspiration from the German rococo style of architecture which featured gold (marzipan) with pastel colours (pink and yellow sponge).'*

This all sounds plausible, but Brown does not inform us of her sources. I would love to know who it was who decided that a celebration cake was required. Until Catherine Brown can point out the primary sources for these statements, I am inclined to believe that she is simply repeating a popular anecdote which appears to have surfaced fairly recently and has no basis in fact. In a recent Great British Bake Off programme, the television historian Kate Williams repeated the same myth.

My good friend Robin Weir, knowing my interest in the Battenburg, was amazed to recently come across an illustrated recipe for an identical cake called Gateau à la Domino in a July 1898 edition of the Victorian food and housekeeping magazine The Table, published and edited by the remarkable Mrs Agnes Berthe Marshall. Although Mrs Marshall's four books on cookery and ice cream are now fairly well known, The Table is rarely cited, though it is one of the most extensive and richest sources on the domestic life and food of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She launched it on 12th June 1886. There were 1690 weekly issues until June 1918. It was then renamed The Table and Housekeeper's Journal and was published fortnightly with 547 issues until its demise in September 1939. In its day The Table was the most important food magazine published in Britain. Mrs Marshall died in 1905, but The Table went on and on.

Mrs Marshall's recipe for Domino Cake appeared in 1898, the same year in which recipes for two almost identical cakes - Frederick Vine's Battenburg Cake and Robert Well's Neapolitan Roll were published. In appearance, Vine's cake is identical to Marshall's with nine panes of alternate pink and white genoese enclosed in an overcoat of almond paste. Well's cake on the other hand, with its four panes is closer to the modern version that we call Battenburg Cake today. If you have not read my earlier posts on this subject, here are some images to show you what these three cakes looked like. 

Mrs Marshall's Gateau à la Domino from The Table,  July 2nd 1898

Frederick Vine's Battenburg Cake from Saleable Shop Goods 1898 - nine panels

 

Wells does not illustrate his cake. so I made his Neapolitan Roll from the recipe he published in Cakes and Buns (1898). Unlike Marshall's and Vine's versions, Well's cake was dusted with pink desiccated coconut and has only four panes. 

It may be that there are other recipes. I have not had a chance to look through the late nineteenth century numbers of the trade magazine The British Baker and Confectioner, which was edited by Vine, so the jury is still out as to who first devised the recipe. To me however one thing is sure, that the myth about the cake having four sections to commemorate the four Battenburg princes is total rubbish. And I am also now very sceptical about the unsubstantiated claim that this cake was originally invented to commemorate the wedding in 1884 of Prince Louis of Battenburg to Princess Victoria. If this was so, why does Mrs Marshall twelve years after the wedding call it a Domino Cake and Wells a Neapolitan Roll?  Below is Mrs Marshall's full recipe, published here courtesy of Robin Weir, who is Britain's leading authority on this remarkable lady.  I have a nagging suspicion that Mrs Marshall may have invented the cake, but cannot prove it. With its vanilla and maraschino flavoured almond paste, her version is more sophisticated than either Vine's or Well's, whose simpler recipes were designed for the trade rather than the domestic cake maker. She also copyrighted her recipe - see below - and declared that it was new. Perhaps the other two pinched it and renamed it in order to disguise their source. So to take a terrible liberty with Gertrude Stein's well known phrase relating to a well known flower, "A domino cake, is a Neapolitan roll, is a Battenburg cake.'

Domino Cakes were normally small rectangles of genoese decorated with icing in the form of dominoes, as No. 4 in this fine chromolithograph by Kronheim from Mary Jewry, Warne's Model Cookery and Housekeeping Book (London: 1868).

What is overlooked in all the Battenburg Cake myths is that there were actually two weddings between English princesses and Battenburg princes. The first was that of Princess Victoria, Queen Victoria's grandaughter, to Louis of Battenburg in 1884. The second took place the following year, when Louis's brother Henry married Queen Victoria's youngest child Beatrice. The bride cake illustrated above is that presented to Henry and Beatrice at their wedding in 1885. When they cut this remarkable cake, I wonder if there was a pattern of red-white-red-white running all the way through it.

*Catherine Brown, Battenberg Cake; A celebration confection fit to grace a royal wedding. The Herald, March 29th 2003.

Read my other two posts on Battenburg Cake -

Battenburg Cake - the Truth

Battenburg Cake Revisited and Neapolitan Roll Rediscovered

Battenburg Cake - the Truth

A factory-made Battenburg Cake - 2011 - four panels

There are lots of stories about this popular English cake, which is composed of alternating coloured slabs of genoese enclosed in an overcoat of almond paste. In cross section it looks like a child's drawing of a window, which no doubt is the reason why it is known in my part of Northern England as 'Chapel Window Cake'. The most commonly told tale about the cake relates to its alleged origin. It is said to have been created to celebrate the 1884 wedding of Prince Louis of Battenburg to Queen Victoria's granddaughter Princess Victoria. There are a few more detailed variations on this theme. One of these was aired recently in Episode 1 of Series 2 of BBC's competitive baking series The Great British Bake Off. This is the theory that the four sections of the cake originally represented the four Battenburg princes - Louis himself and his brothers Alexander, Franz-Joseph and Henry. 

The only problem with this story is that the earliest recipes for this kind of Battenburg Cake all call for nine squares and not the four that are found in modern versions. 

The earliest recipe I know for a Battenburg cake with coloured sections was published by Frederick Vine in 1898 in his marvellous book Saleable Shop Goods. Vine was one of the most eminent professional bakers and confectioners of his day. Not only was he the author of numerous books, but was also the editor of the leading trade magazine The British Baker. In his Battenburg recipe, he clearly tells us to create a cake with nine sections, alternately coloured red and white. He illustrates the finished cake in this diagram.

Battenburg Cake - 1898 - nine panels

This image appeared only fourteen years after Louis and Victoria's wedding and was published by London's most respected baker. If Frederick Vine did not know what a Battenburg Cake was meant to look like, then who did? Well, a few others actually. In the early years of the twentieth century, a number of professionals also published recipes and illustrations that agree entirely with Vine's. For instance, the recipe in T. Percy Lewis and A. G. Bromley's The Book of Cakes (London: 1903) also calls for nine panes, as shown in their striking chromolithograph illustration.

Battenburg Cake- 1903 - nine panels

I have been completely unsuccessful in finding any contemporary accounts of this cake that confirm it was invented to honour the 1884 royal wedding. This fact could well be true and perhaps the tradition is based on a folk memory, but it does not appear to be grounded in any written records. Nor are there any accounts that link the number of its sections to the Battenburg princes, unless of course there were five others we do not know about. Perhaps Louis had some other siblings about whom his father kept quiet! The story of the four panels and the princes appears to have surfaced quite recently and is described on Wikipedia without any citation of its source. If there is somebody out there who is aware of early documentation linking this cake with the Battenburg wedding I would be grateful if they would share their sources with me. 

In 1923, the Battenburg cake was still being made with nine panes, witness the photograph below from Richard Bond's Ship's Baker (London: 1923) an image brought to my attention by the sharp eyed Food History Jottings research assistant Plumcake. Bond is another forgotten British food hero who specialised in books about cookery at sea.

Battenburg cake from Richard Bond, The Ship's Baker (London: 1923).

Richard Bond from the frontispiece of his book Sea Cookery (London: 1910).

A neatly made Battenburg cake is a technical challenge for any baker and I can understand why it was chosen as a trial of skill for the contestants in The Great British Bake Off. In the past, the task of constructing one of these cakes was frequently given to apprentice bakers and confectioners to test their prowess and the results were often exhibited. In a 1936? edition of Vine's book, we can see what Battenburg Cakes (well at least showoff versions of them) had come to look like by the thirties. 

Battenburg Cakes - 1936? - twenty- five panels!

The Battenburg Cakes are those on the left and right. It is the thirties and the number of panels has multiplied from nine to twenty-five - Art Deco gone mad!. Perhaps the bakers are now not only honouring His Serene Highness's princely brothers (including the illegitimate ones), but all of his grandchildren and great grandchildren too! Just how many did he have?

So when did Battenburg Cakes end up with just four panels? I am not sure, but it is possible that it dates from the time that they began to be manufactured by large industrial bakers like Lyons, who as far as I know started mass producing them before World War II. I suppose a four panel Battenburg is much easier to make on a production line than one with nine. Could somebody please enlighten me? 

So where did the story come from about the four Battenburg princes? Well I guess that it was probably invented by the same fairy who has made up so many other stories about our traditional foods - of which more anon. 

If there is a hero in this story, it is Frederick Vine. This forgotten British food writer, about whom you will hear a lot more on this blog, was the author of another book called Cakes and How to Make Them. Unfortunately none of the editions of this book are dated, though some evidence points to a publication year earlier than that of Saleable Shop Goods, possibly about 1890. If this is correct, and more research is needed to confirm it, this book contains the very earliest known recipe for Battenburg Cake. However,  it is a completely different animal to the cake that now bears this name. Vine's earlier Battenburg Cake is in fact a simple fruit cake baked in a loaf tin. If you want to make it, here is his recipe - 

No. 84 Battenburg Cakes.

4lb flour.

One and three quarters of a pound of butter.

One and three quarters of a pound of sugar.

Two and a half pounds of sultana raisins.

Three quarters of a pound of peel (mixed).

1 oz of cream of tartar.

1 oz. carbonate of soda.

8 eggs.

1 quart milk.

Method. - Weigh and rub on the board as before directed, and weigh into large size twopenny greased bread pans ten ounces for sixpenny cakes. sprinkle chopped almonds over. Bake in a moderate oven. These cakes sell well wherever introduced.

From Frederick T. Vine ("Compton Dene"), Cakes and How to Make Them. (nd. c.1890), p. 77.

Battenberg Cake - c.1890 - no panels, but lots of juicy sultanas and mixed peel.

Note that Vine, whose pen name was Compton Dene, tells us that "These cakes sell well wherever introduced." This would indicate that the Battenburg cake was a fairly recent arrival on the bakery scene in the early 1890s. The royal couple were married only six years before the recipe was printed. So perhaps this earlier cake has more claims to being the original celebratory cake than the better known cake of many colours. Vine was at the height of his career at the time of the wedding. If he was alive now I am sure he would be able to tell us why a delicious, but nondescript fruit cake was replaced by a flashy, sickly sweet interloper in a matter of about six years. 

Well, I suppose the moral of this story is not to believe everything you see on television, or read in Wikipedia, which I suppose is where the television researchers found the Battenburg history nuggets that were served up in The Great British Bake Off.

For those of you more interested in fact than fiction, here is Frederick Vine's signature and book plate taken from his copy of Alexis Soyer's Gastronomic Regenerator, which is now in my library. It is a treasured possession. You may also have noticed that throughout these notes, I have spelt Battenburg with a 'u', rather than as Battenberg, which seems to be contemporary practice. Well, I have followed Mr. Vine in this matter too, as I think he should have the last word.

Frederick Vine's signature and book plate.

Since this was published, we have discovered much more about this cake - Click on the links below.

Battrenburg Cake revisted

Yet more on the history of Battenburg Cake

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