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Spoon-Biscuit
One quart sour milk or buttermilk, one tea-spoon soda, a little salt, two table-spoons melted lard, and flour enough for a stiff batter; drop in a hot gem-pan and bake in a quick oven. -Mrs. A. B. Morey
A drop biscuit in all but name: the batter is too loose to roll and cut, so it is spooned straight into a hot iron pan. Two things decide whether it works — the heat of the pan and how little you stir.
- Gem-panA gem-pan is a heavy cast-iron pan of shallow oval or round cups, the direct ancestor of the muffin tin. Grease it and heat it empty in the oven until the fat shimmers before the batter goes in; that initial blast is what gives these their crisp bottom and lift.
- Quick ovenRead this as roughly 400-425F. At a lower temperature the soda spends itself before the crumb sets and the biscuits come out flat and pasty.
- Sour milkIn 1877 this meant raw milk left to clabber, which was acidic and slightly thickened. Cultured buttermilk is the honest modern substitute. Pasteurised milk gone off is not sour milk — it is spoiled, and should be discarded.
- The soda looks lightOne teaspoon of soda to a quart of buttermilk is less than many later recipes call for; those often run nearer half a teaspoon per cup, which would be two teaspoons for this batch. Buttermilk strength varied in a farm kitchen, so the amount was a judgment call. Err toward the smaller quantity: excess soda leaves a soapy, metallic taste and a greyish crumb.
- "Flour enough"The recipe fixes no amount. The target is a batter that mounds on the spoon and holds its shape rather than pouring -- stiffer than pancake batter, softer than dough you could handle -- which for a quart of milk means well over the milk's own volume in flour, added until that consistency is reached.
- Mix once, then stopThe soda begins reacting with the acid the moment the two meet. Combine dry and wet with a few strokes, leaving lumps, and get the pan into the oven straight away. Batter left standing on the counter goes slack and bakes heavy.
- LardTwo tablespoons of melted lard for a quart of milk is a modest amount of fat, and lard was simply what was on hand. Melted butter or a neutral oil works in its place.
- Yield and timingRoughly eighteen to twenty-four biscuits, baking 12-15 minutes until well browned and firm to the touch. Serve them within minutes of coming out of the pan; soda biscuits of this kind are dry and dull by the next meal.
Buckeye Cookery came out of Ohio in the 1870s as a compiled community book, each contribution signed by the woman who sent it in, and the breakfast-cake chapter is full of quick breads leavened with soda and sour milk rather than yeast. That combination was the workhorse of the American farm kitchen: milk soured on its own in the dairy, saleratus or soda was cheap and shelf-stable, and a batch of biscuits could be on the table in twenty minutes without waiting on a sponge to rise. "Gem" pans were widely sold in this period, in many shapes, and "gems" became a generic term for the small quick breads baked in them. Spoon-biscuit sits between a rolled biscuit and a gem: the same dough logic, but wet enough to drop, which saves the cook a floured board and a rolling pin at the busiest hour of the morning.