How to make sugar-free Tudor biscuits

What comes to mind when you think of Tudor food? Perhaps you imagine a great feast at which ostentatious pies were served with stuffed and gilded swans on top. After mountains of meat, the wealthy would banquet on luxurious biscuits, candied fruits and elaborate sugar sculptures. Henry VIII’s leading statesman Thomas Wolsey even created an entire sugar chessboard for such an occasion, complete with moving sugar pieces.

But the Tudor period also experienced great want. Poor harvests were common, landowners closed off pasture to peasants, and the growing population put pressure on dwindling food supplies.

In the 1590s, a huge rise in the cost of grain caused hunger and sparked riots. To help people through the shortages, in 1596 the inventor and agricultural writer Sir Hugh Platt published a special recipe book, Sundrie New and Artificiall Remedies Against Famine. One recipe for “sweete and delicate cakes made without spice, or sugar” caught my eye, not least because we are always on the lookout for non-sugary versions of our favourite treats today.

In Platt’s recipe, dried and beaten parsnip replaces sugar and imported spices such as cinnamon, ginger and nutmeg, which were among the most expensive ingredients of the era. Although parsnip might at first seem an odd addition, we are accustomed to root vegetables in our desserts, carrot cake being a particular favourite.

In times of scarcity, creative cooks have often come up with thrifty ways of substituting ingredients and using up available foods. Root vegetables are cheap, naturally sweet and easy to grow. During the shortages of the Second World War, the British Ministry of Food similarly recommended using carrots to sweeten Christmas pudding.

Carrots or turnips work as well as parsnips, according to Platt, who experimented with different versions of the basic recipe."I haue eaten of these cakes diuers times in mine owne house,” he wrote, promising that “you shal find them to tast very daintily."

Platt’s instructions are very limited: he instructs readers to add parsnip to flour at a ratio of one to two, and to “make some cakes thereof”. It could be that Platt intended his parsnip cake to be a type of ship’s biscuit. Such biscuits were ordinarily made of flour and water, not using anything that might spoil so that they would remain edible during long sea voyages – but they were also, therefore, lacking in flavour.

Following Platt’s policy of substitution, I’ve added butter and a dash of milk to the flour and parsnip to make something that resembles shortbread.

Though parsnip does not fully provide the sweetness of sugar that we’re used to, the biscuits do go down well with an (anachronistic) cup of tea. You could also experiment by adding currants for extra sweetness, using carrots in place of parsnips, or making a risen bread/cake mixture instead.