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Milk Biscuits
Take a quarter of a pound of butter, one quart of milk, one gill of yeast, salt according to taste, and as much flour as will form the dough. Stir flour into the milk so as to form a very thick batter, and add the yeast; this is called a sponge. This should be done in the evening. In the morning cut up the butter, and set it near the fire where it will dissolve, but not get hot; pour the melted butter into the sponge, then stir in enough flour to form a dough; knead it well, and set it on one side to rise. As soon as it is perfectly light, butter your tins, mark out the dough in small cakes, and let them rise. When they are light, bake them in a very quick oven, take them out, brush the tops over with water, and send them to table hot.
A raised bread roll rather than a biscuit in the American chemical-leavened sense: an overnight sponge, enriched with butter in the morning, shaped and baked hot. The quantities make a large batch by modern standards.
- A gill of yeastA gill is a quarter of a pint: 5 fl oz in British measure, 4 fl oz (half a cup) in American. Here it means liquid barm or a wet yeast slurry, not dry granules. For a sponge built on a quart of milk, one packet (2¼ tsp) of instant or active dry yeast will serve; the long overnight rise gives it ample time.
- Scale and yieldA quart of milk plus a quarter pound of butter will take somewhere around 9 to 11 cups of flour in total and yields roughly three dozen small rolls. Halving the whole recipe is sensible for a household of two or three.
- "As much flour as will form the dough"Left to the cook's judgement, as the salt is. Add flour until the dough clears the bowl and is soft but not sticky; an enriched milk dough should stay slightly tacky rather than stiff.
- The temperature of the butterThe instruction to melt it near the fire but not let it get hot is the hinge. Hot fat poured into the sponge can kill the yeast, which starts to die somewhere above about 120F. Melt it and let it cool to barely warm before it goes in.
- A very quick ovenThe book gives no temperatures; "very quick" is conventionally read as somewhere around 425 to 450F. Small enriched rolls want the high heat so they set and colour before the butter-rich crumb dries out; 12 to 15 minutes is usually enough.
- The sponge timingMade in the evening and used in the morning, this is a cool overnight ferment. In a modern heated kitchen the sponge may over-ripen and turn sour by breakfast; the refrigerator, or a cooler room, keeps it closer to what the original assumed.
- "Mark out the dough in small cakes"Divide or score the dough into small pieces on the buttered tin. The recipe does not specify spacing; if set close enough to touch as they prove, they will have the soft sides of a pull-apart roll.
- Brushing with waterWater on the hot crust softens it and gives a dull, tender finish rather than the shine of an egg or milk wash. Do it the moment the rolls leave the oven, and serve them warm as directed.
This belongs to a family of yeast-raised "biscuits" that sit between bread and teacake, a category common in nineteenth-century English and American cookery before chemical leavens took over the word. The overnight sponge is the older method: a wet batter of flour, milk and barm left to work while the house slept, so the cook had a living ferment ready before the fire was properly up in the morning. A gill of yeast in a recipe of this date is often taken to mean barm skimmed from brewing or bought from a brewer, though compressed or German yeast was also sold by this period; barm was unreliable in strength, and that is one reason recipes of the period lean on long rises rather than precise timings. Milk and butter mark the dough as an enriched one, and the instruction to send them to table hot places them squarely at breakfast or tea, where hot rolls were expected to arrive straight from the oven.