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Flaky Biscuit Crust
6 Tablespoonfuls Snowdrift 2½ Cupfuls Flour 4 Teaspoonfuls Baking Powder 1 Teaspoonful Salt Sift together the dry ingredients, then rub in two-thirds of the Snowdrift, until the mixture looks mealy. Moisten, to make a stiff dough, turn onto a floured board, and pat to one-third inch in thickness. Spread to within a half inch of the edge with one From ¾ to a Cupful Milk tablespoonful of the Snowdrift, fold over, press the edges together, and roll out again. Then spread with the remaining Snowdrift, fold over and roll again to onehalf inch thickness, and cut in the desired shapes.
A rough-puff biscuit dough: the shortening goes in twice, in layers, rather than all at once. That lamination is the whole point of the recipe and the part most likely to be skipped.
- The hinge: keep everything coldThe two spread-and-fold turns only produce flakes if the fat stays in sheets rather than melting into the dough. Work quickly, and if the kitchen is warm, chill the patted dough for ten minutes before the first fold.
- SnowdriftA cottonseed-oil shortening from the Southern Cotton Oil Company, sold in tins; later formulations were hydrogenated. Any modern vegetable shortening substitutes measure for measure; lard gives a similar texture and more flavour. Butter will work but softens faster, so the folds need to be brisk.
- The garbled milk lineThe typesetting has collapsed here. The liquid is ¾ to a cupful of milk, added at the word "Moisten" — the ingredient line simply floated into the middle of the method.
- Spreading, not cutting inOnly two-thirds of the shortening is rubbed in. The remaining two tablespoons are smeared over the rolled sheet, one at a time, before each fold. Soft, room-temperature shortening spreads; hard fat straight from the fridge will tear the dough.
- Baking powderFour teaspoons to 2½ cups of flour is on the generous side by current standards. Three teaspoons of modern double-acting powder would be ample.
- No oven givenThe recipe leaves the temperature unstated. Biscuits of this kind are generally baked in a quick oven, around 450°F for 10 to 12 minutes, until well risen and browned at the edges.
- What "crust" means hereThe title suggests a biscuit topping as much as a pan of biscuits: rolled to half an inch, a dough of this kind would go over a pie or a cobbler. Cut in rounds it should yield roughly a dozen two-inch biscuits, depending on the cutter.
Snowdrift was one of the cottonseed-oil shortenings that reshaped American baking in the first decades of the twentieth century, arriving alongside Wesson oil and, from 1911, Crisco. Cottonseed oil had been an industrial by-product of the Southern cotton crop; refining and hydrogenation turned it into a cheap, shelf-stable, neutral-tasting substitute for lard, and the companies promoted it with free or near-free recipe booklets of exactly this sort — every recipe naming the brand, often several times in a single paragraph. The technique itself is older than the product: spreading fat over a rolled sheet and folding it in stages is a simplified rough puff, long used for the biscuit crusts that topped pot pies and cobblers in households that would not have attempted a true French pâte feuilletée. What the booklet is really arguing is that a manufactured vegetable fat could do what butter and lard had always done, and do it more reliably in a hot kitchen.