Wulf's Webden

One family Christmas tradition is to enjoy some late suppers of port, stilton and Bath Oliver biscuits. However, that has been hard to do in recent years as the biscuit. The hard but creamy tasting biscuit was invented by William Oliver, a physician based in the city of Bath, around the year 1750. Although in commercial production for over 200 years, they went out of production in 2020 (blamed on supply chain issues due to COVID-19). There was apparently a brief resurgence but the company responsible announced in 2025 that they were unlikely to return to regular production.

There is a campaigning website, set up in 2020, to try and campaign for them but it has sat unchanged since last time I looked. The site includes a couple of suggested recipes, neither of which I have yet tried. Since there is no telling when the site will go dark, I’m posting the first one I want to try here as a “may try this coming month” project. It is attributed to Lizzie Collingham’s Recipe from The Biscuit: The History of a Very British Indulgence and cited as a version printed in The Telegraph on 7 October 2020.

The ingredients are 1/2 tsp dried yeast, about 100ml lukewarm milk, 1/2 tsp sugar, 100g butter, 400g plain flour and 1/2 tsp salt. 1 tsp is equivalent to about 5g and I’ve got a scale that can measure to 0.05g so I’ll count all the tsp measures as 2.5g.

I’m also going to make some decisions on adapting the recipe. I’ll start by putting the flour, salt and butter into the food processor and blending to create a crumb like texture and then adding the milk, which has been mixed with the sugar and yeast. I anticipate the result will be more like a pastry than a bread dough but, being yeasted, it should start to rise over the following hour or two. I’ll then knock back and knead until smooth before resting for another half hour.

At that point, I’ll roll out to “thickness of a pound coin” (ie. 2.8mm), which might be an opportunity to do some 3D printing. The idea of guides in the form of set radius rings or caps to slide onto either end of my rolling pin appeals as an elegant way to do this but it will probably be a custom job. Initially I’ll probably do the cutting out with one of my existing circular cutters and prick out the biscuits with a fork but I can also envisage creating more custom components if the recipe proves to be good (for neatly space holes and perhaps even a little portrait of Dr Oliver).

To finish, they will rest on a baking sheet on baking parchment for another half hour and then get baked in a pre-heated oven for about 15 minutes (“lightly golden and crisp”) at about 170°C. The recipe says 190°C for a regular oven or 180°C for a fan oven but I normally take 20°C off the normal temperature to adjust for a fan and the last thing these biscuits want is overbaking.

If I get round to the baking, I’ll report back on whether it was an instant hit or if I had to do some tweaking (or switch to the other recipe).