Home › Breakfast and Tea Cakes › Soda Biscuit
Soda Biscuit
Put one quart of flour, before sifting, into sieve, with one teaspoon soda and two of cream tartar (or three of baking powder), one of salt, and one table-spoon white sugar; mix all thoroughly with the flour, run through sieve, rub in one level table-spoon of lard or butter (or half and half), wet with half pint sweet milk, roll on board about an inch thick, cut with biscuit cutter, and bake in a quick oven fifteen minutes. If you have not milk, use a little more butter, and wet with water. Handle as little and make as rapidly as possible.-M. Parloa.
A plain chemically leavened biscuit from the era when cooks still mixed their own baking powder in the sieve. It comes together in minutes, and speed is the whole point.
- Handle it fastThe closing line is the hinge. Soda and cream of tartar begin reacting the moment the milk goes in, so the dough should be mixed, rolled, cut and in the oven with no pauses. Kneading or re-rolling scraps repeatedly gives tough, flat biscuits.
- A quart of flourMeasured before sifting, that is about 4 cups, roughly 1 lb / 450 g of all-purpose flour. Nineteenth-century flour was generally softer than modern bread flour; all-purpose or a Southern soft wheat flour is the closer match.
- Half pint sweet milkOne cup. "Sweet" simply means fresh and unsoured, as opposed to the buttermilk or sour milk used with plain soda. Whole milk is right. One cup to four cups of flour makes a stiff dough by modern standards; expect to add a splash more to bring it together.
- The leaveningOne teaspoon soda to two of cream of tartar is the classic homemade baking powder ratio, and the recipe's own alternative of three teaspoons commercial baking powder is offered as a rough equivalent, though commercial powder is diluted with starch and gives somewhat less lift. Use one or the other, not both.
- Very little fatOne level tablespoon of lard or butter to a quart of flour is lean by modern standards. The result is a plain, dryish biscuit rather than a flaky Southern one; two to four tablespoons gives something modern eaters recognize, at the cost of authenticity.
- A quick oven425-450F (220-230C). At an inch thick, fifteen minutes is about right at that heat; check at twelve. A cooler oven lets the biscuits spread before the leavening sets them.
- YieldAbout 12 to 14 biscuits from a 2-inch cutter. Best eaten within the hour.
The attribution is probably to Maria Parloa, a cooking teacher and lecturer who ran a school in Boston in the 1870s and became one of the most widely reprinted American culinary authorities of the century; recipes signed with her name circulated freely through community compilations like Buckeye Cookery, whose Ohio original appeared in Marysville in 1876, with the 1877 revision issued as Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping from Minneapolis. The recipe sits at a turning point in American baking: it offers the older do-it-yourself pairing of soda and cream of tartar first, with commercial baking powder as a parenthetical alternative, which is roughly the order of preference a thrifty household would still have had in the 1870s and 80s. Earlier books in this tradition lean on saleratus and sour milk; within a generation the parenthesis would swallow the main clause and baking powder would be assumed. The instruction to use "sweet" milk is itself a period marker, distinguishing fresh milk from the soured milk that was an unavoidable fact of life before reliable refrigeration.