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Baking Powder Biscuits
2 cupfuls flour 2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 2 teaspoonfuls baking powder (Amount of baking powder may be increased if especially raised biscuits are desired. 2 teaspoonfuls, however, is most healthful amount.) 1 teaspoonful salt Milk Mix and sift twice dry ingredients. Work in Crisco with finger tips, add gradually milk, mixing wit knife to soft dough. Toss on floured board; pat and roll to one-half inch thickness. Shape with biscuit cutter. Place on Criscoed tin and bake in hot oven twelve minutes. To have good biscuits dough should be handled as little as possible, just enough to get in shape to cut. Milk or water used for mixing should be very cold, and biscuits should be gotten into oven at once after adding liquid to flour. If top of each biscuit is lightly brushed over with melted Crisco before baking, crust will be much nicer. Sufficient for fifteen biscuits.
A standard shortening biscuit from a Crisco promotional cookbook. The method is sound; only the missing liquid quantity and the vague oven need translating.
- The milk is unmeasuredExpect about 3/4 cup of cold milk for 2 cups of flour, added a little at a time. Flours vary, so stop when the dough is soft and just holds together — slightly tacky, not wet.
- "Hot oven" means 450F"Hot oven" means roughly 425-450F. Twelve minutes suits that range; at a moderate oven the biscuits will dry before they colour.
- The hinge: cold fat, minimum handlingThe instruction to keep everything very cold and to handle the dough as little as possible is the whole recipe. Overworking develops gluten and melts the shortening into the flour, and you lose the flaky layers.
- CriscoCrisco is still sold, though reformulated over the years; the original was hydrogenated cottonseed oil. Any solid vegetable shortening works, as does lard, at the same 2 tablespoons. Butter will brown more and taste better but softens faster in the mixing.
- "Criscoed tin"A greased flat baking sheet. A modern parchment-lined sheet needs no grease at all.
- Baking powderSupermarket baking powder today is double-acting, which is more forgiving than many of the powders then on sale — but the advice to get the biscuits into the oven immediately still holds. The note that 2 teaspoons is "most healthful" reads as period wariness about using more chemical leavening than necessary.
- Yield and sizeFifteen biscuits from 2 cups of flour at the specified half-inch thickness implies a cutter of about 2 inches. Cut straight down without twisting so the sides can rise cleanly.
- Brushing the topsMelted shortening gives the crust the book promises; melted butter or a little cream gives more colour.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated vegetable shortening the company introduced in 1911 — which is why shortening appears in nearly every recipe, including the greasing of the tin. Baking powder biscuits themselves are older than the book by decades: chemical leavening became widely available to American households in the second half of the nineteenth century, and quick biscuits steadily displaced the yeast-raised and saleratus-and-sour-milk versions that had come before. The parenthetical insistence that two teaspoons of baking powder is "most healthful" belongs to a moment when the merits and safety of competing baking powders were a subject of loud public argument.