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Taffy Biscuits
Roll the baking-powder biscuit mixture into an oblong sheet a half inch thick. Spread it with Snowdrift to within a half inch of the edge, dust thickly with brown sugar, roll like jelly roll, cut in half-inch slices, place, cut side down, on a baking-pan rubbed with Snowdrift, and bake from fifteen to twenty minutes in a hot oven, 375 degrees F., taking care not to burn them.
A cinnamon-roll construction built on biscuit dough rather than yeast dough, from a shortening manufacturer's promotional book. The original assumes you already have its baking-powder biscuit recipe to hand.
- The biscuit baseA standard baking-powder biscuit of the period is about 2 cups flour, 4 teaspoons baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 4 tablespoons fat cut in, and 3/4 cup milk. Mix it barely enough to come together — overworked dough turns tough and will not spiral cleanly.
- SnowdriftA brand of cottonseed-oil shortening (hydrogenated in its later formulations). Any solid vegetable shortening works; softened butter gives better flavour in the filling, though the roll will be marginally less tender.
- The ovenThe recipe calls 375F a "hot oven," which is closer to moderate by current reckoning. 375F is correct here and works; the sugar filling will scorch at higher heat, which is presumably behind the recipe's warning not to burn them.
- Sugar leakageBrown sugar and fat liquefy into caramel and run out of the cut ends. Line the pan with parchment or bake in a shallow rimmed pan; the caramel that escapes sets like glass on bare metal.
- Cutting the slicesA knife squashes the spiral. Slide a length of unwaxed thread or dental floss under the roll, cross the ends and pull to cut clean half-inch rounds.
- The half-inch borderThe recipe keeps the Snowdrift half an inch back from the edge; a fat-free margin plausibly helps the seam stick so the rolls do not unwind in the oven.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no dimensions, but an oblong from that quantity of dough should yield roughly a dozen or more half-inch slices. Best eaten warm; biscuit dough goes dry quickly and these are better reheated than kept.
This comes from a cookbook published to sell Snowdrift, a cottonseed-oil shortening marketed in the American South by the Southern Cotton Oil Company -- cottonseed having shifted within a generation from a ginning waste product to a major source of cooking fat. Books of this kind were given away or sold cheaply, and recipes in them name the brand wherever the chance arises, as this one does twice. The dish itself is the biscuit-dough answer to a cinnamon roll: where a bakery would proof yeast dough for hours, a household with baking powder could produce something spiralled and sweet in well under an hour. The name is loose -- "taffy" here seems to signal the sticky caramel that forms as brown sugar and fat melt together in the coils, not the pulled confection.