Home › Breakfast and Tea Cakes › Hard Tea Biscuit
Hard Tea Biscuit
Two pounds of flour, one-fourth pound butter, one salt-spoon salt, three gills milk; cut up the butter and rub it in the flour, add the salt and milk, knead dough for half an hour, cut cakes about as large as a small tea-cup, and half an inch thick, prick with a fork, and bake in a moderate oven until they are a delicate brown. -Mrs. Denmead, Columbus, Ohio.
A stiff, barely-enriched dough in the English water-biscuit tradition, closer to a cracker than to what Americans now call a biscuit. Two things decide the outcome: the long kneading and the docking.
- The measurements in modern termsTwo pounds of flour is roughly 7 to 8 cups; a quarter pound of butter is one stick (4 oz). A gill is half a cup, so three gills of milk is 1 1/2 cups. A salt-spoon is about 1/4 teaspoon.
- The dough will look too dryThat ratio gives well under 50 percent hydration, which is correct here. Resist adding milk; a slack dough will puff and soften instead of baking hard and crisp.
- Half an hour of kneading is not a misprintHard biscuits get their close, snappy texture from thoroughly developed and then compacted gluten. Related hard doughs, such as beaten biscuit, were worked with a rolling pin or mallet, though this recipe calls only for kneading. A stand mixer with a dough hook on low will do the work in 12 to 15 minutes, but the dough should end up smooth, dense and almost elastic-tough.
- Moderate ovenConventionally taken as somewhere around 350-375F. The recipe gives no time, only "until they are a delicate brown"; these are meant to dry out as much as to brown, so err toward longer at the lower temperature rather than shorter and hotter.
- Cut and prick"As large as a small tea-cup" is a round of about 2 1/2 to 3 inches. Pricking all the way through with a fork keeps steam from lifting the biscuit into blisters, which is the difference between a hard biscuit and a puffed one.
- YieldAround two dozen from the full batch. The recipe scales down cleanly by half.
- KeepingCooled completely and stored airtight, biscuits this dry keep well for weeks. Butter, cheese or tea are the obvious accompaniments, and they soften quickly in humid air, so a tin rather than a bag.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877) was assembled from recipes sent in by Ohio housewives, some of them credited to the contributor by name and town, which is why Mrs. Denmead of Columbus appears here rather than an anonymous editor. Her hard tea biscuit belongs to the old family of unleavened or barely leavened flour-and-water biscuits that runs from ship's biscuit through the English water biscuit to the American soda cracker: flour, a little fat, liquid, and a great deal of mechanical work in place of any raising agent. The long kneading and the fork-pricking are the whole technique. By the 1870s commercial bakeries were already turning out crackers by machine, so a hand-made version in a household book like this one reflects a kitchen that still baked its own tea things rather than buying them by the box.