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HORSFORD BISCUIT
One quart flour, pint sweet milk, half tea-cup lard, heaping salt-spoon salt. Measure each of Horsford's Preparation, mixed in flour, and sifted twice through a sieve. Divide the flour in halves, add the salt; with one hand pour in the milk on the half of the flour, with the other mix to a thin paste, then add the lard and the rest of the flour, mixing it lightly. The dough will be soft, but can be rolled on a well-floured board, and cut with a common biscuit-cutter, then prick, and bake twenty minutes in a quick oven. Make crust as above (using two-thirds cup lard or butter instead of half-cup) for chicken-pie with oysters (see recipe in poultry); it is enough for a four-quart pan, where the sides only are lined. Some prefer not to cook the oysters, only boil and skim liquor, adding oysters raw. serve pint or pint and a half chicken-liquor (do not mix the oyster-liquor with that in the pot, but pour it in the pie by itself) in the kettle, place it on the stove, rub together table-spoon butter, two of flour, season very highly with pepper, stir it in the boiling chicken-liquor, salt to taste, cook until there is no raw taste to flour, serve in gravy-boat as dressing for pie. Re-
A quart-of-flour biscuit dough that doubles as a top-and-sides crust for chicken pie. The text as printed is defective in one important place, so read the notes before you start.
- The missing quantity"Measure each of Horsford's Preparation" is defective as printed; a quantity has dropped out. If you substitute a modern phosphate baking powder, about four level teaspoons to a quart of flour is a reasonable working figure, but treat it as a reconstruction of our own, not the author's number and not a documented period standard.
- Horsford's PreparationAn acid-phosphate leavener sold by the Rumford Chemical Works, the ancestor of modern Rumford baking powder. Ordinary double-acting baking powder is the substitute; it is stronger per spoonful than some nineteenth-century brands, so do not increase the amount.
- MeasuresA quart of sifted flour is 4 cups, roughly 1 lb. A pint of milk is 2 cups. A tea-cup is smaller than a modern cup — usually reckoned at about three-quarters of one, though the measure was not standardised — so half a tea-cup of lard is somewhere around 3 oz. A salt-spoon is a scant 1/4 teaspoon, and "heaping" makes it a rounded 1/4.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, specified because soured milk and buttermilk were the everyday alternative and would demand soda instead of the phosphate powder.
- Oven and timeA quick oven is usually reckoned at roughly 400-425F, though the term was never precise. Twenty minutes at that heat will overbake modern biscuits cut at ordinary thickness; check at 10 to 12 minutes and pull them when the tops are set and coloured. The longer time suits the thicker pie crust.
- Mixing methodThe two-stage handling is the point: half the flour is beaten with all the milk into a thin batter, which hydrates the flour and starts the gluten, then fat and the remaining flour go in lightly. Do not knead once the second half of the flour is added.
- The oystersAdding them raw to the pie is sound; they finish in the oven, and pre-simmered oysters shrink and toughen. Cook and skim the liquor, but keep it out of the chicken liquor and pour it into the pie by itself, as the text directs; no reason is given for the separation.
- YieldA generous batch of biscuits from a 2-inch cutter — the exact count depends on how thick you roll — or crust enough for a four-quart pie dish lined at the sides only, as the text says. The recipe breaks off mid-word at the end of the printed page.
Horsford's Preparation was the product of Eben Norton Horsford, a Harvard chemistry professor who worked out a bread leavener based on monocalcium phosphate and marketed it through the Rumford Chemical Works in Rhode Island from the 1850s onward — the line survives as Rumford baking powder. Naming a brand in a recipe title, rather than calling for a generic "baking powder," belongs to the moment when packaged chemical leaveners were displacing saleratus and sour milk, and commercial powders varied in strength and composition from maker to maker.