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Baking Powder Biscuits
2 cups pastry flour. 4 teaspoons baking powder. 1/2 teaspoon salt. 2 tablespoons Cottolene. 3/4 cup milk or water.
PROCESS: Sift together flour, baking powder and salt. Add shortening and rub into flour with tips of fingers, using a light touch. Add milk or water, mix with a knife to a soft dough. Turn on a lightly floured board; knead slightly. Pat and roll to one-half inch thickness. Shape with mall biscuit cutter. Place close together in a buttered pan and bake in a hot oven fifteen minutes.
A straightforward rubbed-in biscuit from a cookbook written to sell shortening. Two things carry it: cold fat left in visible flakes, and an oven hot enough to set the crust before the baking powder is spent.
- CottoleneA branded cottonseed-oil shortening sold by the N. K. Fairbank Company, discontinued long ago. Substitute 2 tablespoons of vegetable shortening, lard, or cold butter; butter gives more flavour and a slightly firmer crumb.
- A hot oven425-450F. Preheat fully — biscuits rely on a fast burst of heat for lift, and fifteen minutes at that temperature is about right for half-inch rounds.
- Pastry flourA soft, low-protein flour, roughly 8-9 percent. All-purpose works, but the biscuits will be a little tougher; a common home workaround is to replace part of each cup of all-purpose with cornstarch, though the usual 2-tablespoon swap lands nearer cake flour than pastry flour.
- Baking powderFour teaspoons to two cups of flour is on the generous side by current practice, and period baking powders were often single-acting. With a modern double-acting powder, 3 teaspoons is ample and will taste less metallic.
- "Mall biscuit cutter"A typesetter's slip for small. A 2-inch cutter is the usual reading; press straight down without twisting, or the cut edge seals and the biscuit rises lopsided.
- Close together in the panDeliberate, not incidental. Biscuits set side by side support each other as they rise and stay soft at the joins; spaced apart they brown all round and spread more.
- Handling"Knead slightly" means a few folds only. Worked further, the gluten develops and the biscuits go bready.
- YieldRoughly a dozen to fifteen 2-inch biscuits, depending on re-rolling. Best within an hour of baking.
52 Sunday Dinners was published in the 1910s as advertising for Cottolene, a cottonseed-oil shortening from the N. K. Fairbank Company, and the ingredient turns up throughout the book wherever lard or butter would otherwise be specified. Cottonseed oil was a by-product of the Southern cotton crop that food manufacturers spent the late nineteenth century turning into a saleable kitchen fat, first as compounds like Cottolene and then, after hydrogenation was applied commercially, as the solid white shortenings that displaced them. The biscuit itself is older than any of that: a chemically leavened quick bread that spread through American home cooking once reliable baking powder became cheap in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the sort of thing a promotional cookbook would choose precisely because it puts the fat front and centre.