Historic Recipe: Cheese Biscuits (1938)

Source: Home Management; A Comprehensive Guide-book to the Management of the Household, containing authorative contributions by Experts, compiled and edited by Margaret Garth and Mrs Stanley Wrench (1938)

Recipe:
3oz butter
2oz grated cheese
4oz flour
Pinch of salt and pepper

Cream the butter and cheese, and add the salt and pepper and flour. Knead to a firm dough. Then put it on a floured board and cut into rounds. Prick before putting them in the oven. Put on a backing-sheet and bake till pale brown.

I used self-raising flour, partly because that’s what I had in the cupboard and partly because I wanted to give the biscuits some oumph (that’s a technical term by the way) and for the cheese I used bog standard cheddar because, again, that’s what I happened to have.

After combining everything as instructed, the rest of the recipe was basically guess-work. I rolled the dough out fairly thinly and used a cookie cutter to cut rounds, I then cooked them at 200 degrees, (which probably means about 180 in a not rubbish oven) for 15 minutes. This all seemed to work and the results were both tasty and had the correct level of crunch.

Suggested alterations: You could definitely add some mustard, herbs or a different kind of cheese for a bit of variation, but the biscuits worked pretty damn well in their basic form.

Final verdict: Easy and quick to make and a yummy end-product. A Kate seal of approval bestowed