Tea Biscuit
2 cups flour. 4 tablespoons Cottolene. ¾ teaspoon salt. 4 teaspoons baking powder. 3/4 cup milk.
PROCESS: Mix and sift flour, salt and baking powder, add Cottolene and rub it in lightly with tips of fingers. Add milk and mix to a soft dough with a knife. Toss on a floured board, pat and roll to one-half inch thickness. Shape with a small biscuit cutter, place close in buttered pan and bake 15 minutes in hot oven.
A plain baking-powder biscuit of the sort that appeared on the tea table rather than at dinner. The proportions are sound and translate directly to a modern kitchen.
- CottoleneA brand of cottonseed-oil shortening sold heavily in the 1890s and early 1900s and long since gone. Substitute 4 tablespoons of vegetable shortening, lard, or cold butter by weight (about 2 oz).
- Salt quantityThe salt reads as 3/4 teaspoon, which matches 2 cups of flour and this amount of baking powder. Reduce to 1/2 teaspoon if using salted butter as the fat.
- Hot ovenThe book gives no temperatures; 'hot oven' is conventionally read as somewhere around 400-450F. Biscuits want the high heat so the baking powder lifts them before the crumb sets; a slack oven gives flat, dense rounds.
- Rub in lightlyThis is the hinge. Work the fat in only until it is in flake-sized pieces and stop; a warm, overworked dough will not layer.
- Mix with a knifeStirring with a knife blade rather than a spoon keeps the dough from being compacted. Mix only until the flour is damp, then turn it out.
- Place close in the panSetting the rounds so their sides touch makes them rise upward instead of spreading, and keeps the sides soft. Deliberate, not careless.
- Baking powderModern double-acting baking powder may well be stronger than some of what was sold around 1900. Three teaspoons will probably do here; four is not harmful, though some palates catch a faint metallic edge.
- YieldThe recipe specifies only a small cutter; with a 2-inch one expect roughly a dozen. Best within an hour of baking.
This is a straightforward American baking-powder biscuit, the descendant of the soda-and-sour-milk breads that chemical leavening replaced over the second half of the nineteenth century. The naming of Cottolene in the ingredient list is the period detail worth noticing: 52 Sunday Dinners was published by the N. K. Fairbank Company, which manufactured Cottolene, and the book functions as an extended advertisement for cottonseed-oil shortening as a cheaper, supposedly more wholesome alternative to lard. "Tea biscuit" here means the small hot bread served with afternoon or evening tea, a lighter meal than the Sunday dinner the book is built around, and the reason a batch this size was thought sufficient.