Review: British "biscuit" = American "cookie"
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 06 5, 2012
As I plan to review four of Ms. Romsey's cookbooks, I think it best to cover the major issue I have with all of them right at the beginning: Measurements and ingredient names.  For the British marketplace, it's not a problem.  British cooks will understand things like cornflour and caster sugar; Americans will have to look them up. Volumes can be a problem. British cooks will know that the pints of liquid referred to are Imperial pints.  Americans will have to do some stepping to come up with the equivalent measurements for some ingredients.  (For the record, an Imperial pint is roughly 20 liquid oz. Thus 1/4 of a pint will be about 5 oz in the UK, not 4 as it is here in the US.) Ingredients listed by weight are simpler, and any cook who routinely uses a scale for baking will have no problems with these.  However I think that it would have been an enormous help to all cooks if the measurements had been converted to metric.The other issue I have, and I don't think this is necessarily a problem with Ms. Romsey's formatting, is that pages will sometimes repeat on my Kindle.  I'll go through the first page of a recipe, turn the page and find most of the information repeated on the next page.  I don't know what causes this issue, but be aware of it as you work. It can be confusing if you're in the middle of a recipe.As I indicated in the title of this review, it's good to remember that what we're dealing with here are what Americans refer to as "cookies" or in the case of the savory variety, "crackers."  Here in the US, a biscuit is closer to a British scone, so if that's what you want, you might want to check out Jane Romsey's scone cookbook, also available on Kindle.I have to say I was thrilled to find a recipe for wholemeal or digestive biscuits.  They're a guilty pleasure of mine since they're about midpoint between sweet and savory, so they're great for snacking or with cheese or cold meats, fruit or vegetables.  I was also happy to find another version of gingersnaps, aka "gingernuts" which are easily my favorite cookies.Moving beyond my favorites I found some tremendously interesting recipes, for instance, Cornish Fairings which appear to be a kind of spice cookie, which require the baker to drop the baking sheet on the counter at about mid-point through the baking in order to make them spread and crackle on the top. How on earth was that technique discovered?The savory cheese biscuits sounded delicious until I got to the crunchy peanut butter.  The jury is still out on that one since I don't have the rest of the ingredients to bake up a batch.  To be honest, my initial instinct was to substitute cream cheese, but then I remembered peanut butter crackers and thought perhaps I'd try it Romsey's way first.There are a lot of very delicious-sounding recipes in this book. There are also additional points of confusion here.  I note that Jammie Dodgers call for "cornstarch." I was under the impression that cornstarch was referred to in the UK as "cornflour." The use in the recipe doesn't give me much of a clue either.  At this point, your guess is as good as mine.