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Powder Biscuits
3 Cupfuls Flour. 6 Teaspoonfuls Baking Powder. ¾ Teaspoonful Salt 1/2 Tablespoonful Sugar 3 Tablespoonfuls Snowdrift Equal Parts Milk and Water (about a Cupful) Sift together the dry ingedients, then rub in the Snowdrift with the fingertips or the back of the mixing-spoon, until the mixture looks flaky. Pour in equal parts of milk and water to moisten-approximately a cupful-then quickly turn the mixture onto a slightly floured board and pat or roll it to one-half inch in thickness.
Shape into rounds with the biscuit cutter, tucking under the edges as you work, so there will be no remnants. Place, scarcely touching, on a baking-pan oiled with Snowdrift, and bake in a quick oven, 375 degrees F., about fifteen minutes.
Thin biscuits will bake in ten minutes.
A standard baking-powder biscuit built around a branded shortening. The method is sound; the numbers need a little translation.
- SnowdriftA cottonseed-oil shortening sold in tins; later formulations were hydrogenated, earlier ones compounded with animal fat. Any solid vegetable shortening works, and lard or cold butter give more flavour, though butter's water content makes the dough slightly wetter.
- The flour and leavening are missingThe ingredient line as printed gives only salt, sugar, shortening and liquid. For proportion, a cupful of liquid of this kind normally goes with about 2 cups of flour and 3 to 4 teaspoons of baking powder; work from a current biscuit recipe for the exact ratio rather than guessing here.
- "A quick oven, 375 degrees"The book's own number is low for biscuits by modern practice. Most bakers now use 425-450F for 10 to 14 minutes, which sets the crust before the leavening exhausts itself and gives a better rise.
- Keep the fat in flakesThe hinge of the recipe is in the phrase "until the mixture looks flaky." Stop rubbing while visible pieces of shortening remain; rubbing to an even meal gives a cake-like, close-grained biscuit.
- Milk and water in equal partsCommon in recipes of this kind, and most likely an economy, though the book gives no reason for it. All milk works and browns a little better; all water gives a plainer, crisper biscuit.
- "Tucking under the edges"The instruction is to avoid re-rolling scraps, which toughens them. Alternatively, cut the slab into squares with a knife and waste nothing.
- Placement"Scarcely touching" is deliberate: biscuits set side by side support each other and rise taller, with soft sides. Spaced apart, they brown all round and spread more.
- YieldAbout a dozen two-inch biscuits from a cupful of liquid. They are at their best within the hour.
Snowdrift was one of the hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortenings that reshaped American baking in the first decades of the twentieth century, and the cookbooks bearing its name were promotional: every recipe calls for the product, down to oiling the pan with it. Chemically hardened vegetable fat was sold as cleaner, more uniform and more economical than lard, and Southern cooks in particular were a natural market, cottonseed being a by-product of the region's dominant crop. The biscuit itself is far older than the tin - quick breads leavened with chemical baking powder spread rapidly after commercial powders became widely available in the later nineteenth century, replacing the older soda-and-sour-milk method - but its appearance here is a demonstration that the new fat could do what lard had always done.