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Biscuit (Take one quart sifted flour)
Take one quart sifted flour (loosely put in), one measure each of the acid and soda (or two heaping teaspoons acid and one moderately heaping teaspoon soda) of Horsford's Bread Preparation, one teaspoon salt, three gills of water; shape with a spoon and the floured hand.
A bare-bones baking powder biscuit from the era when the leavening came in two separate packets. The whole method rests on speed and a wet dough.
- Horsford's Bread PreparationA two-part chemical leavener sold as a tin of acid (monocalcium phosphate) and a tin of soda, each with its own little measure. In place of both, use modern double-acting baking powder — roughly 4 to 6 teaspoons for the quart of flour — and omit the soda.
- Three gills of waterA gill is half a cup, so this is 1 1/2 cups — a very wet, sticky dough by modern habit. That is deliberate: these are drop biscuits, shaped with a spoon and a floured hand rather than rolled and cut.
- A quart of flour, loosely put inRoughly 4 cups spooned in without packing, about 16-18 oz. The instruction to fill loosely matters, since a scooped and shaken quart can run several ounces heavier and will stiffen the dough past the point where a spoon will handle it.
- No fatThere is no butter or lard here at all, which is unusual and gives a lean, bready biscuit closer to a dumpling than to a Southern shortened biscuit. A few tablespoons of cold butter cut in will change the character but is not what the recipe intends.
- OvenNone is given. Drop biscuits of this size want a hot oven, 450F, for 12-15 minutes; a slower oven lets the chemical leavening spend itself before the crumb sets.
- Work fastPhosphate leaveners begin reacting the moment liquid hits them and, unlike modern double-acting powder, give little further lift from oven heat. Mix, shape and load the pan without pausing.
- YieldAbout 16 to 18 biscuits from a quart of flour, depending on how generous the spoon is.
Horsford's Bread Preparation was the commercial product of Eben Horsford, a chemist who worked out how to make monocalcium phosphate from bone and later mineral sources, and it was sold through the second half of the nineteenth century as a substitute for cream of tartar, which was expensive and often adulterated. It came as two powders to be measured separately, since acid and alkali packed together would react in the tin \-\- the cornstarch-buffered single-can baking powder that solved that problem was a later refinement. That a household cookbook of the period would print a recipe calibrated in "one measure each" of a specific brand shows how thoroughly these preparations had entered ordinary kitchens, and how the older method of saleratus plus sour milk was giving way to something a cook could buy and trust to behave the same way twice.