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South Carolina Biscuit
One quart sweet cream or milk, one and a half cups butter or fresh lard, two table-spoons white sugar, one good tea-spoon salt; add flour sufficient to make a stiff dough, knead well and mold into neat, small biscuit with the hands, as our grandmothers used to do; add one good tea-spoon cream tartar if preferred; bake well, and you have good sweet biscuit that will keep for weeks in a dry place, and are very nice for traveling lunch. They are such as we used to send to the army, and the "boys" relished them "hugely."- Mrs. Colonel Moore, Hamilton, Ohio.
This is a hard, close-grained travelling biscuit in the Southern beaten-biscuit tradition, not a light breakfast biscuit. The original quantity is enormous by modern standards and the flour is left entirely to the cook's judgement.
- The hinge: work, not leaveningThere is no soda and no yeast, so nothing will lift these. The texture comes from prolonged, hard kneading, which develops gluten and traps small amounts of air; in the related beaten-biscuit tradition the dough was pounded with a mallet or rolling pin for a long stretch, though accounts differ on how long. This recipe asks only for kneading. Underworked dough gives a dense, chalky biscuit.
- Cream of tartar aloneThe optional teaspoon of cream of tartar is an acid with no alkali to react with, so it will not raise the dough. It slightly tenderises the crumb and sharpens the flavour, which is likely what was noticed at the time.
- ScaleOne quart is 4 cups of cream or milk. How much flour a stiff dough will take is guesswork, likely ten cups or more, and the batch will run to several dozen small biscuits. Quartering the recipe is sensible unless you are provisioning a household.
- "Flour sufficient to make a stiff dough"Genuinely open-ended, and deliberately so. Aim for a dough noticeably firmer than pie pastry, one that holds a fingerprint and does not slump. Flour then and now differs in absorbency, so add the last cup or two gradually.
- Fresh lardMuch nineteenth-century household lard was rendered at home, softer and more strongly flavoured than the hydrogenated block sold today, though commercial packing-house lard was also widely sold by the 1870s. Butter works, but for the intended keeping quality use rendered leaf lard or a good non-hydrogenated lard.
- "Bake well"No temperature is given anywhere in the original. A moderate oven, in modern terms something like 375F for 20 to 25 minutes, until pale gold and firm all the way through, is a reasonable approximation. Anything underbaked retains moisture and will mould instead of keeping.
- KeepingThe claim of weeks is plausible because the biscuits are baked hard and dry; the high fat content, if anything, is what will eventually turn rancid. Cool completely before storing in a tin; any warmth trapped inside condenses and undoes the whole point.
History: Hard, dry, keepable breads of this kind needed only flour, fat, liquid and labour, and were made where reliable yeast was scarce. Mrs. Colonel Moore's note that "they are such as we used to send to the army" points to the Civil War, when women's aid societies and individual families packed food boxes for soldiers, and a biscuit that survived weeks in transit was worth more than a tender one. Buckeye Cookery (1877) was compiled from contributed household recipes, which is how a Carolina-named biscuit arrives here by way of Hamilton, Ohio, with its wartime provenance attached. The reference to shaping them by hand "as our grandmothers used to do" suggests the practice was already being remembered as an older one by the 1870s.