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Soda Beaten Biscuit
1 quart flour 3 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1/2 teaspoonful salt 1/5 teaspoonful baking soda Buttermilk Sift flour with soda and salt, then rub in Crisco thoroughly with finger tips, and mix to stiff dough with buttermilk. Beat with rolling-pin or hammer until dough blisters. Roll out one-third inch in thickness, cut with round cutter, and lay on Criscoed tins. Bake in moderate oven from thirty to forty minutes. Sufficient for forty biscuits.
Sour Milk Biscuits (Kate B. Vaughn) 2 cupfuls flour 3 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 teaspoonful salt 1/2 teaspoonful baking soda 1 cupful sour milk Sift flour and salt into basin, rub Crisco lightly into them. Stir soda into milk until it effervesces and then add to flour. Turn out on floured baking board, knead lightly until smooth, roll out quarter of an inch thick, cut with biscuit cutter, place on greased tin and bake twelve to fifteen minutes in hot oven.
Sufficient to make twelve biscuits.
Two related quick breads, one worked by hand until the dough blisters and one barely kneaded. The units and the leavening both need translating.
- A quart of flourMeasured by volume, a quart is 4 cups, roughly 460 to 500 g of all-purpose flour. The recipe sifts the measured flour together with the soda and salt.
- The 1/5 teaspoonful of sodaAn odd figure that may be a printer's slip for 1/4 or 1/2, though fractions of this kind do turn up in period books. Beaten biscuit is traditionally made with little or no chemical leavening at all, so the small amount is plausible; treat it as a scant 1/4 teaspoon and do not scale it up.
- The hinge: beat until it blistersThe beating, not the soda, is what makes these rise. Fold the dough over on itself between blows and keep going 20 to 30 minutes by hand until the surface shows small blisters and the dough is satin-smooth. A food processor with the dough blade, run in bursts for several minutes, does the same work; a stand mixer with the paddle is slower but workable.
- Oven temperatures"Moderate oven" is roughly 350 to 375F for the beaten biscuits; "hot oven" for the sour milk biscuits is roughly 425 to 450F. The long 30 to 40 minutes at the lower heat is what the recipe calls for and produces a pale, hard, dry cracker-like round, not a fluffy one.
- CriscoThe book was published to promote it, hence the branding throughout. Any solid vegetable shortening works, or lard, which is what Southern cooks used before hydrogenated fat arrived. Rub it in until the flour looks like coarse meal.
- Sour milk vs. buttermilk"Sour milk" in books of this period meant raw milk clabbered at room temperature. Modern pasteurized milk does not sour usefully; use cultured buttermilk, or milk soured with a tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice per cup.
- Working the sodaIn the second recipe the soda goes into the milk and is added once it effervesces. Get the shaped biscuits into the hot oven promptly, since the reaction begins immediately and the lift is spent within minutes.
- YieldForty small beaten biscuits from the quart of flour, so cut them about 1 1/2 inches across at one-third inch thick. Docking each round twice with a fork keeps them from puffing.
Beaten biscuit belongs to the pre-baking-powder South, where the leavening came entirely from air and steam driven into a stiff, barely wet dough by half an hour of pounding with a rolling pin, a mallet, or the flat of an axe on a hardwood block. Well-off households later used a "biscuit brake," a hand-cranked roller bolted to a table, and the labor involved is a reminder that these were company biscuits, made by someone whose time was not her own. The result is closer to a hard water cracker than to a modern baking-powder biscuit, and it keeps well, which was part of the point. Its appearance here beside a much quicker sour-milk biscuit shows the transition in progress, and the Crisco branding running through both recipes marks the promotion of hydrogenated vegetable shortening as a replacement for lard and butter.