Twin Biscuits
1 cupful milk 1/2 teaspoonful salt 2 teaspoonfuls baking powder 2 cupfuls flour 2 tablespoonfuls Crisco Sift flour, baking powder, and salt together, rub in Crisco with tips of fingers, then add milk. Pat and roll out dough, cut with cutter, brush with melted Crisco, place one on top of another, lay on Criscoed tin and bake in hot oven from ten to twelve minutes.
Sufficient for twelve biscuits.
A plain baking-powder biscuit dough, cut twice as many rounds as you need and stacked in pairs so they split cleanly at the table. A few notes on the shorthand of 1915.
- Hot ovenRoughly 450F by the usual modern equivalence, though the book gives no figure. At that heat the ten to twelve minutes given is about right; in a cooler oven the biscuits will dry out before they colour.
- CriscoStill sold, and still a hydrogenated vegetable shortening, though reformulated over the years to cut trans fats. Any solid vegetable shortening works, as does lard or cold butter, but butter contains water and will give a slightly less tender crumb.
- Keep the fat coldRubbing in with the fingertips is the key handling step. Work quickly so the fat does not soften and smear into the flour; the layers in this recipe come from the stacking rather than from the rubbing-in.
- Two tablespoons is leanThat is a low ratio of fat to two cups of flour by modern biscuit standards, which usually run to a third or half a cup. Expect a firm, slightly bread-like biscuit rather than a rich Southern one.
- FlourHousehold flour of the period was often softer than today's all-purpose. A soft winter-wheat flour, or all-purpose with a couple of tablespoons swapped for cornstarch, comes closer.
- "Criscoed tin"A greased baking sheet. Parchment does the same job. Set the stacked pairs close together so their sides touch and they rise upward rather than outward.
- The twinningBrushing the lower round with melted fat before stacking is what lets the pair pull apart. Skip it and the two rounds fuse into one thick biscuit.
- Yield"twelve biscuits" most likely means twelve doubled biscuits, which would mean twenty-four cut rounds, so roll the dough thin and use a small cutter. Press the cutter straight down without twisting.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil, a prolific cookery writer of the period, and published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, which the company had introduced in 1911 and marketed as the first hydrogenated all-vegetable shortening. That is why the fat is named as a brand throughout the method, including the tin. The recipe belongs to the quick-bread tradition that chemical leavening opened up in the nineteenth century.