Name: How to Make Victorian Petits Fours Biscuits | with Dr Annie Gray
Uploaded: 2020-05-06T19:26:25.000Z
Duration: 9 min 20 s
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Hello I'm Dr. Annie Gray and  together with English Heritage  

I'm here to show you a historic  recipe that you could make at home.

Today we're talking teatime treats  and I'm making something called  

Petit Fours à Thé -  'little biscuits for  tea'. They come from a book written by  

Jules Gouffé in 1867. His brother was a  man called Alphonse Gouffé and he was  

Queen Victoria's head pastry cook - her  longest serving pastry cook. These are  

the kind of biscuit that Queen Victoria  herself would have enjoyed with a cup  

of tea, perhaps at her favorite holiday  home - Osborne house on the Isle of Wight.

The recipe is very simple indeed. Make  sure your flour is well sieved...in the  

past there may well have been bugs in it  or bits of bran all sorts of things but  

today it's still quite useful because  you want to aerate it. Then, make a well  

in the centre. Jules Gouffé calls this  making a fountain which I've always  

thought is rather lovely. Add in your  caster sugar...your butter...you then need  

to add a good pinch of salt that's  as much as you can take between the  

two four fingers of your hand and your  thumb. Next you need some grated lemon  

zest...your cream...and finally your  egg yolk. You don't need the entire  

egg yolk so give it a bit of a squiz  and add about half to two-thirds of  

it depending on the size of your egg.  Then all you need to do is mix it up.

I'm using lemon zest to flavor these  biscuits but there are various recipes  

in Gouffé's book so you could use  something like lavender or vanilla  

or even ginger or mixed spice instead of  the lemon. It's worth getting your hands  

in there to really mix it up but try not  to handle the dough too much in case you  

completely melt the butter. What you really want to do is just bring it together  

a little bit like making shortcrust pastry.

This now needs to rest for about an hour.  The Gouffé brothers would have had access to a cold larder with  

shelves made out of marble or slate  which would have kept things really  

quite chilly at least around eight to  ten degrees. However in a modern kitchen  

Once your dough has chilled in the fridge for about an hour you can then roll it out.

Alphonse Gouffé would have had a separate pastry room.

At Windsor Castle, 'the pastry' as it was known was a whole separate brigade of chefs.

They had three or four rooms just to themselves

It wasn't however like that that at Osborne house where the pastry really was  

just a marble shelf. In fact an awful  lot of things were sent across to Osborne

from Windsor Castle so although  Alphonse Gouffé probably did get to  

visit Osborne house a few times most of  the time he would have been working at Windsor.

Being a professional recipe this is quite an exact one.

Apparently you are supposed to roll your dough  out so it is six millimetres thick.

I'm using a tiny marble slab because I  don't happen to have my own pastry room.  

Next using whatever cutters you fancy  you are going to cut out your little  

biscuits. I'm using a leaf and a flower, a  triangle and various playing card shapes.

Biscuit cutters like these were really,  really popular in the Victorian era. 

The Industrial Revolution had led to  advances in metal production and so  

these were mass-produced meaning  that almost anybody could now buy  

these and have their very own elegant  tea tine biscuits. Once you've cut out  

your pastry shapes just put them onto a  baking tray lined with a piece of

grease-proof paper. You could also  use a silicone baking mat in these  

slightly more modern world. Next  you need to glaze your biscuits.

To make your glaze you're going  to take your reserved egg white  

and then the tiny bit of an egg  yolk that you've got left over  

and just mix the two together.  A tiny pinch of salt...then just  

brush the surface of your biscuits  with a little bit of your egg wash.

These biscuits are very very easy to  make... they're the kind of thing that  

would have been churned out by the Royal  kitchens. The amount of mixture that I've  

got makes around 50 small biscuits  but the original recipe is for four  

times that. Next I'm going to decorate  the tops of each one of these with  

something whether it is a raisin or a  piece of peel or angelica it's important  

that they look delicate and beautiful.  Because they're so easy these are the  

kinds of biscuits that might also have  been made by Queen Victoria's children.

She built them a Wendy house called the  Swiss cottage at Osborne House and the  

children absolutely loved playing there.  It had a very small model kitchen and  

the children learnt to cook. They even  had their own vegetable patches outside.  

It's very difficult to know exactly what  the children did cook in their kitchen  

but this is the kind of thing that they  may well have got to grips with and then  

served up for their mother and father at a kind of royal children's afternoon tea.

These now need to go into the oven. They need a temperature of 180 degrees  

conventional - that's 170 fan, or around  350 degrees Fahrenheit. The original  

recipe calls for them to go into a brown  paper oven because in the Victorian  

era there weren't really such things as  Celsius dials on ovens and so the canny  

cook would work out how hot or cold  their oven was by putting a piece of  

paper into it. If it went black well that  was too hot, if it went brown it was a  

brown paper oven, if it went yellow then  it was a yellow paper oven, and so on and so forth.

They need about 15 minutes  until they are golden brown on top.

When your biscuits have had 15 minutes  in the oven lay them on a cooling  

rack or an upturned sieve just to cool  completely and then you can display them.

Choose a pretty plate - after all, these  biscuits do deserve it. Queen Victoria  

was very, very fond of afternoon tea.  The Illustrated London News regularly  

published pictures of her finding tea at  the side of the road accompanied by her  

personal attendants, the Indian servants  or indeed her Scottish servants always  

clad in kilts. She normally ate a bit  too much at afternoon tea it must be  

said but then when your biscuits  are as good as these I think I would too.

And there we go. Petit Fours à Thé - biscuits fit for a queen.

Thank you for watching.  If you do decide to make these at home  

then why not share them with us?  We're on social media @EnglishHeritage  

and for more tasty historic titbits you can sign up to our YouTube channel.  