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Biscuit (Dissolve one rounded)
Dissolve one rounded table-spoon of butter in a pint of hot milk; when lukewarm stir in one quart of flour, add one beaten egg, a little salt, and a tea-cup of yeast; work into dough until smooth. If winter, set in a warm place; if summer, in a cool one to rise. In the morning work softly and roll out one-half inch and cut into biscuit and set to rise for thirty minutes, when they will be ready to bake. These are delicious.
These are raised biscuits — a yeasted overnight dough rolled and cut like baking-powder biscuits. The only real obstacle is the leavening, since "a tea-cup of yeast" means a cup of liquid homemade yeast that no longer exists in a modern kitchen.
- The yeastA tea-cup of nineteenth-century liquid yeast — potato or hop barm — carried less lifting power per ounce than modern yeast. A tea-cup in this period was reckoned at roughly 4 to 6 oz. About two teaspoons of active dry or instant yeast should do the same work; if you use dry yeast, reduce the milk by about the volume of the liquid yeast you are leaving out.
- MeasuresA pint is 2 cups of milk; a quart of flour is about 4 cups, or 17–18 oz by weight. The dough should be soft and slack, closer to a bread dough than a cut biscuit dough, so hold back a little flour and add it only if the mass will not clear the bowl.
- Temperature of the milk"When lukewarm" is the hinge. Milk hot enough to melt butter will kill yeast; let it come down to 100–110F before the yeast goes in, or the overnight rise simply will not happen.
- The overnight riseSet the dough at cool room temperature, 65–68F, for 8 to 10 hours. The book's winter-warm, summer-cool instruction is trying to hit that same window in a kitchen with no thermostat; a refrigerator overnight also works and improves the flavour.
- Rolling and cuttingHalf an inch is correct — these rise a great deal in the second proof and again in the oven. Cut straight down without twisting and set them close together on the pan for soft sides, apart for crisp ones.
- OvenThe original gives none. Bake at 425F for 12 to 15 minutes, until the tops are deep gold; the thirty-minute second rise should leave them visibly puffed and slow to spring back.
- YieldThis is a large batch; a quart of flour rolled a half-inch thick will give considerably more than a dozen two-inch biscuits. They are at their best soon after baking, which suits a dough mixed the night before.
Raised or "yeast" biscuits sit at the junction of two traditions: the soft wheat quick bread of the American South and the older English overnight barm dough. Buckeye Cookery (a compilation drawn largely from Ohio contributors, and issued in an 1877 Minneapolis edition) gives them as a dough mixed the night before and baked at first light, when the stove was already hot for coffee. The vagueness about the yeast is a period fingerprint — a household might keep a jar of its own liquid yeast going, fed with potato water or hops, and a cook measured it by the cup because no two batches were alike in strength. Compressed cake yeast is generally said to have become widely available in the last quarter of the century, and it is that shift, more than any change in the flour or the method, that makes this recipe read as unfamiliar today.