Home › Breads › Maryland Beaten Biscuits
Maryland Beaten Biscuits
4 cupfuls flour 1/2 cupful Crisco 1 teaspoonful salt Milk Water Mix and sift flour and salt. Cut Crisco in with knife or work in lightly with finger tips. Mix a little milk and water together, chill thoroughly and add enough to dry ingredients to make stiff dough. Everything should be as cold as possible. Beat with rolling-pin until dough blisters. Roll to one-third inch in thickness and cut into small biscuits, prick in center and set in refrigerator an hour before baking. Place biscuits on Criscoed tins and bake in moderate oven thirty minutes. Biscuits may be baked in moderate gas oven and gas turned off when biscuits are golden brown. Allow biscuits to remain ten minutes in cooling oven to dry out.
Sufficient for sixty small biscuits, a fraction larger than a dollar.
A beaten biscuit is not a fluffy Southern buttermilk biscuit. It is a hard, pale, cracker-like round leavened entirely by air and steam forced into the dough by physical beating, and the recipe only works if you take that beating seriously.
- The hinge: beat until it blistersThere is no baking powder or soda here, so the lift comes from air pounded into a very stiff dough and expanded by steam in the oven. Expect 20 to 30 minutes of hard work with a rolling pin, folding the sheet over on itself after every few strokes; the dough is ready when the surface raises small smooth blisters and the cut edge looks satiny and layered rather than grainy. A food processor with the dough blade, run several minutes until the mass slaps the bowl and looks silky, is the usual modern substitute, though the recipe gives no timing of its own.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350 to 375F; the book gives no temperatures. The finished biscuits should be barely coloured on top and cooked dry through, not browned like a dinner roll.
- The drying stageThe recipe offers this as an alternative for a gas range: turn the heat off once the biscuits are golden brown rather than at a fixed thirty minutes, and leave them in the cooling oven another ten minutes so the interior dries out. It is worth doing; a beaten biscuit left moist in the middle will not keep.
- CriscoThe book was published to sell it. Crisco is still made, though reformulated, and any solid vegetable shortening works. Lard is the older Maryland fat and gives a slightly richer, shorter crumb; 1/2 cup is about 3 1/2 to 4 oz by weight depending which you use.
- Unmeasured liquidThe milk-and-water mixture is deliberately left open because flours vary. Add it a spoonful at a time and stop while the dough is still noticeably stiffer and drier than a rolled biscuit dough — roughly 3/4 to 1 cup total for 4 cups of flour, but go by feel, not the number.
- Cold everythingChilled liquid and cold fat keep the fat solid through a long beating that would otherwise warm the dough into greasiness; the hour in the refrigerator after cutting firms the shaped biscuits again before baking. Do not skip the rest.
- Docking'Prick in centre' means straight through to the pan with a fork. Undocked biscuits are apt to puff and hollow instead of splitting cleanly along the horizontal seam.
- Yield and keepingSixty biscuits 'a fraction larger than a dollar' — a silver dollar of the period runs about 1 1/2 inches, so figure something between 1 1/2 and 1 3/4 inches, cut with a small round cutter. They keep well in a tin and are usually eaten split, with ham or butter.
Beaten biscuits belong to the Chesapeake and the upper South, where they were the standard bread for country ham and for tea tables well before commercial baking powder was cheap and reliable. Making them was heavy labour, historically performed by enslaved and later by hired cooks who pounded the dough on a marble slab or a hardwood block with a mallet, an axe head or a flat iron; by the later nineteenth century some households owned a hand-cranked "biscuit brake", a pair of geared rollers that did the same work. The half hour of beating is not decoration — it develops gluten and traps air in a dough too stiff to rise any other way, which is why the result is closer to a water cracker than to a modern biscuit. Its appearance here, with Crisco in place of lard, is characteristic of the promotional cookbooks issued by shortening manufacturers in the 1910s and 1920s: an old regional recipe carried forward as evidence that the new product could do everything the old fat did.