Nougat Biscuits: or, Oatmeal Tuiles

If I got these wrong, I'm just a stupid American.

Nougat Biscuits ½ cup flour ¾ cup brown sugar 2 cups quick-cooking or instant oatmeal ½ cup melted butter or beef dripping 2 teaspoons treacle or molasses 1 teaspoon baking soda 2 tablespoons boiling water Heat oven to 300°. Have baking sheets ready and lined with parchment paper or greased foil. (Even if you don't usually line your pans, you really want to for this recipe.) Mix the flour, sugar, and oatmeal. Stir in the melted butter and molasses. Dissolve the baking soda in the boiling water, and mix it in. Mixture will probably be crumbly. Drop the by the tablespoon(ish) onto the baking sheets into neat little mounds. Bake for about 5 minutes, or until barely golden on the edges. They will look underdone in the center-- take them out anyway. As soon as they're baked, slide the pan out from under the paper, letting it land on the counter. Allow the biscuits to cool before lifting them away. The Southern Districts Advocate; Katanning, Western Australia; 6 June 1932; page 1

Today, we are revisiting Australian newspapers! I couldn't stop flipping through cookery columns after just one recipe. 

I've never heard of nougat biscuits before. I only know nougat as that sort of neutral sugar-fluff that fills the voids in candy bars. So I was really curious to see what the heck these are.

The Southern Districts Advocate; Katanning, Western Australia; 6 June 1932; page 1

Just like the last time we made a recipe from Australia, I couldn't get through the ingredient list without help. Last time, it was making my own self-raising flour. This time, we had to determine what "¾ lump sugar" was. I posted the recipe online, asking for help. The consensus was that they left out a word, and it should either be "¾ [cup or pound of] lump sugar." I shouldn't be surprised that they missed a word. Just a few lines down, we are told to dissolve the baking soda in boling water, and the recipe never says what to do with the dessertspoon of treacle.

While people were typing out advice, I also got the helpful hint that the word nougat in the recipe title probably means these are supposed to come out soft.

With these lovely starting tips, I was ready to make biscuits. 

Sharp-eyed readers will note that I decided to simply stir in the treacle (or the molasses, because you really can't get treacle up here) with the butter. I also didn't fuss over trying to measure out precise dessertspoonfuls of the sticky stuff, instead just putting an arbitrary-sized splot of it into the bowl. After all, the currant loaf printed immediately below today's recipe calls for "half a large cup of milk."

I had thought the melted butter would hold all of our ingredients together, but we still had a crumbly mess. You could kind of you squeeze a little of it into a ball in your fist, but it fell apart as soon as you tried to gently set it down on anything. I wondered: are we making biscuits or granola?

Incidentally, as I popped a measuring cup into the microwave with a little water for dissolving our baking soda, I wondered how (and why) anyone would boil a few spoons of water in the pre-microwave era. I then decided to imagine that people in Australia near-constantly had the kettle on for tea, and it was therefore no trouble at all to pour out a splash of water whenever the need arose for nougat biscuits. I have no basis for this, but I would love to believe in a place where it's always time for tea.

To give our biscuits their best chance, I tried squeezing a few lumps of dough together and very delicately placing them on the pan. But that seemed like too much work for a recipe that was probably headed for the trash, so I only did that for three or four of them. Besides, the directions say to "drop in small spoonfuls." Who knows, maybe they kind of melt and coalesce in the oven.

The writers didn't give a baking temperature (not surprising since thermostatic ovens weren't yet cheap enough to go into every home), but we do get a helpful note: "Oven must not be too hot, as they brown quickly." Those last words are not an understatement. Even after lowering the temperature to 300° (gas mark 2, 150°C), they were ever-so-slightly browned after the specified five minutes.

I do want to repeat that as an ignorant American, I am probably getting these dreadfully wrong. Or maybe the newspaper had another misprint besides the amount of sugar. But if we're taking this recipe (mostly) at its word, these come out better if you kind of make neat little piles of... um... well we can't call it cookie dough. Cookie mixture, perhaps? Anyway, you want to keep it in mounds instead of letting it fall where it lands. 

I'm still not sure if I'm making biscuits.

To my surprise, these mostly held themselves together after they baked and cooled off. You could even (carefully) lift them off the paper intact-ish. Mind you, they are incredibly fragile. You would have to pack them very carefully if you didn't want a box of crumbs. (But if they fail on you, you can say you made granola.)

 

These tasted a lot better than they should have. You'd have thought I stirred a lot of butterscotch chips in them. It didn't help that they're small, so you can easily tell yourself "Oh, just one more won't hurt a thing..." 

At first I was worried about what might happen if I was in the same house as the nougat biscuits for too much longer. So I left the kitchen with a cup of tea and nothing else. About fifteen minutes later, I heard a shout from the kitchen: "These are YUMMY!" (Yes, yummy. We've passed a lot of water since I last heard that word used unironically by anyone over the age of nine-- until tonight.)

Around ten minutes later, I returned to the kitchen and found I had been saved from every last one of my biscuits.

Today, I'm going to sign off with something that turned up while I was looking through Australian newspapers for mentions of "lump sugar." (I had hoped to find something like a grocery ad with packaging sizes.)

The Preston Mail and District Advocate; Collie, Western Australia; March 4, 1939; page 2