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Buttermilk Biscuits
1 quart flour 2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 teaspoonful salt 1 teaspoonful baking soda 1 teaspoonful baking power 1 egg 3/4 pint buttermilk Sift flour, baking powder, salt, and sugar together, then rub in Crisco with finger tips, add egg well beaten, and soda mixed with milk. Dough should be soft and little more milk can be added if needed. Roll out lightly and handle as little as possible. Cut with biscuit cutter, lay on Criscoed tins and bake in hot oven ten minutes.
Sufficient for thirty biscuits.
A standard soda-and-buttermilk biscuit, written when Crisco was new and measured in pints and quarts. A few of the quantities need translating, and one ingredient in the method never appears in the list.
- The missing sugarThe method says to sift in sugar, but no sugar is listed. Either omit it or add a teaspoonful with the dry ingredients; at that level it affects browning more than sweetness.
- A quart of flourFlour measured by volume: a quart is 4 cups, roughly 16-18 oz depending on how it is scooped. Sift first, as instructed, and spoon it into the cup rather than packing it.
- Three-quarters of a pint of buttermilkThat is 1 1/2 cups. The dough should be soft and slightly sticky, and the recipe rightly allows more milk; a dry biscuit dough will not rise properly.
- CriscoPlain vegetable shortening, then a novelty product. Any solid shortening or an equal weight of cold butter works; keep it cold so it stays in flakes when rubbed in. Two tablespoons for a quart of flour is a lean biscuit by modern standards.
- Hot ovenThe book gives no temperature; 425-450F is the usual reading for a 'hot oven'. Ten minutes suits the upper end of that range for a thin biscuit; give thicker ones 12 to 14 and look for a set, browned top.
- Soda and baking powder togetherThe soda reacts with the buttermilk's acid, the baking powder gives a second lift in the oven. Mixing the soda into the milk, as written, disperses it evenly and starts the reaction, so get the pans into the oven promptly.
- HandlingThe instruction to handle as little as possible is the hinge of the recipe. Pat or roll once, cut straight down without twisting the cutter, and press scraps together rather than kneading them.
- YieldThirty biscuits means small ones, cut with a 1 1/2 to 2 inch cutter and rolled about half an inch thick. A 2 1/2 inch cutter will give you closer to fifteen.
This comes from A Calendar of Dinners, one of the recipe books Procter & Gamble circulated after Crisco went on sale in 1911 to teach cooks what to do with hydrogenated vegetable shortening; the brand name appears in the ingredient list and again as a verb, "Criscoed tins," which is a fair measure of how promotional these volumes were. The biscuit itself is much older than the fat: soda raised with the acid in buttermilk was a mainstay of nineteenth-century American quick breads, and the association of the buttermilk biscuit with the South is usually attributed to the availability there of soft winter wheat and sour milk. The double leavening here, soda plus baking powder, is common in recipes of this period, though the combination remains standard in buttermilk biscuits today.