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Little Cream Biscuit
2 cups pastry flour. 1/4 teaspoon salt. 4 teaspoons baking powder. 1 tablespoon Cottolene. 3/4 cup of rich cream.
PROCESS: Mix and sift flour, salt and baking powder. Rub in Cottolene with tips of fingers. Cut the cream into mixture with a silver knife. When well mixed, toss on a well-floured board, pat and roll one-half inch thick. Shape with very small biscuit cutter (size of silver dollar), brush the top over with milk and bake twelve to fifteen minutes in a hot oven.
Supplementary Recipes
A plain cream biscuit, leaned on the fat in the cream rather than a large amount of shortening. Two adjustments do most of the work: the oven number and the substitute for Cottolene.
- CottoleneA cottonseed-oil shortening sold by the N. K. Fairbank Company, which sponsored this book; it no longer exists. Use 1 tablespoon of vegetable shortening, lard or cold butter.
- "A hot oven"Read this as roughly 425-450F. Biscuits want heat fast so the baking powder lifts before the crumb sets; twelve to fifteen minutes suits pieces this small at that heat.
- Pastry flourSofter and lower in protein than modern all-purpose. Substitute by measure with a mix of about 1 3/4 cups all-purpose plus 1/4 cup cornstarch, or use a bleached Southern-style soft-wheat flour straight.
- Baking powderFour teaspoons to two cups of flour is high by current practice. Three teaspoons of modern double-acting powder gives plenty of lift with less risk of a metallic aftertaste.
- "Rich cream"At this date this meant a cream at least as rich as today's heavy cream, though period fat contents varied and were not standardised. Heavy cream works directly; half-and-half will give a drier, tougher biscuit.
- Cutting in the creamThe silver knife may simply be a thin, cool blade that does not warm or overwork the dough; period cooks also avoided ordinary steel for taste and staining. The recipe does not say which. Stop as soon as the flour is damp and holds together.
- Size and yieldA silver dollar is about 1 1/2 inches across. Cut at that size and 1/2 inch thick you should get roughly 20 to 24 biscuits; press scraps together gently rather than rerolling.
- Milk washBrushing with milk rather than egg gives a soft, pale-gold top. For a darker crust, brush with cream instead.
52 Sunday Dinners (1913, by Elizabeth O. Hiller) was published by the makers of Cottolene, and the shortening's frequent appearance in the book's pastry and biscuit recipes is the point of the enterprise: cookbooks given away or sold cheaply by manufacturers were one of the main ways American home cooks were taught to use a new industrial ingredient. Cottolene, a blend of cottonseed oil and beef fat, was on the market in the later nineteenth century and advertised heavily in the 1890s as a cleaner, more economical alternative to lard. Cream biscuits themselves are older and simpler than that, belonging to the family of quick breads that spread after chemical leaveners became reliable and cheap in the second half of the nineteenth century; because the cream supplies both the liquid and most of the fat, they suited a household with its own dairy or a good milkman. Cutting them to the size of a silver dollar marks these as tea or dinner biscuits, meant to be passed hot rather than split and filled.