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Fine Soda Biscuits, with Buttermilk
1½ cup Buttermilk, 1½ qts. Flour, 1 tablespoonful Water. 1 teaspoonful The Great "Arm & Hammer" Soda.
Lard size of a large egg. 1 teaspoonful Salt, Mix salt and soda with the water (lukewarm), letting stand a short time, then add to buttermilk; sift flour into a bowl, rub the lard into it, add the buttermilk and other ingredients, working all into a dough. Roll out and cut into biscuits with a cutter, or shape by hand. Bake in a hot oven. A buttered paper laid over biscuits after they have risen will prevent them from getting too brown; and they may be brushed with milk before baking.
A straightforward buttermilk biscuit from a baking-soda advertising booklet, written for cooks who measured flour by the quart and fat by comparison to an egg. Two things need attention: the flour-to-liquid ratio as printed, and the leavening.
- The liquid is the hingeOne and a half quarts of flour is roughly six cups, about 1½ lb; 1½ cups of buttermilk will not hydrate it into a rollable dough. Either scale the flour down to about 3 cups for the stated buttermilk, or add buttermilk to the full flour quantity until the dough just comes together — expect close to 2½ cups.
- Soda quantityOne teaspoon of soda for six cups of flour is light by modern practice, which runs nearer ¼ teaspoon per cup of flour. If you keep the original flour weight the biscuits will be dense; the ratio works out reasonably if you halve the flour.
- Dissolving the sodaMixing salt and soda into lukewarm water before it meets the buttermilk is worth keeping. It prevents the yellow-brown flecks and soapy patches that undissolved soda leaves in a biscuit.
- Lard size of a large eggAbout 2 oz, or a scant ¼ cup. Use it cold and rub it in only until the flour looks like coarse meal; butter or shortening can stand in by weight, though butter carries water and is not an exact equivalent.
- A hot oven425–450F. Biscuits want fast heat so the soda gas expands before the crumb sets.
- Buttered paperParchment does the same job and needs no butter. Lay it loosely over the tops once they have domed if they are colouring faster than they are cooking through.
- Yield and timingThe full quantity makes roughly two dozen 2-inch biscuits; the halved version, about a dozen. Bake 10–14 minutes, until risen and set with a light gold top.
Booklets like this one were published by soda manufacturers to teach households a then-new chemistry: bicarbonate of soda reacting with an acid — here the lactic acid of buttermilk — to raise bread in minutes rather than hours. Earlier American kitchens used saleratus, a potassium-based leavener with a coarser, more bitter reaction, and the Arm & Hammer brand name (in use from the 1860s by Church & Co., later Church & Dwight) was pushed hard as the purer, more reliable successor. That the recipe names the trade name at all tells you exactly what it was selling: not the biscuit, which every cook already knew, but the reliability of the tin. Buttermilk at the time meant the tart liquid left from churning butter, thinner and sharper than the cultured product sold now.