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Cocoa Biscuit
2 cups or 1 pint of sifted flour, 3 level teaspoonfuls of baking powder, 1/2 a teaspoonful of salt, 2 level tablespoonfuls of sugar, 4 level tablespoonfuls of Baker's Breakfast Cocoa, 2 level tablespoonfuls of butters or lard, 2/3 a cup of milk or enough to make a firm but not a stiff dough. Sift all the dry ingredients together, rub in the butter with tips of the fingers. Stir in the required amount of milk. Turn out on slightly floured board, roll or pat out the desired thickness, place close together in pan and bake in very hot oven ten or fifteen minutes.
A plain baking-powder biscuit with cocoa worked into the dry mix. It behaves like any rolled biscuit dough, and the usual biscuit rules apply.
- Oven temperature"Very hot oven" means 450-475F. Cocoa scorches faster than plain flour, so stay at 450F and check at ten minutes.
- Breakfast CocoaBaker's Breakfast Cocoa was a natural, unsweetened, non-alkalised cocoa with a fairly high fat content. Any unsweetened natural cocoa works; Dutch-process will read milder and darker. The lift here comes from baking powder rather than soda, so the difference is mostly one of flavour and colour, but natural cocoa is closer to the original.
- Cocoa is not flourThe four tablespoons of cocoa are added on top of the two cups of flour, not substituted for any of it. Cocoa does absorb liquid, and the milk is given as "2/3 a cup of milk or enough to make a firm but not a stiff dough," so a little more may be needed.
- Fat, and handling itTwo level tablespoons is roughly an ounce, a lean amount by modern biscuit standards. Rub it in cold and quickly; warm hands and overworked dough give tough, flat biscuits.
- "Place close together in pan"Deliberate, not casual. Biscuits touching in the pan support each other as they rise and stay soft-sided; spaced out they brown all round and rise less.
- Thickness"The desired thickness" is left to the cook. Half an inch gives a biscuit that rises to about an inch; thinner than a quarter inch and you get a cocoa cracker.
- YieldAbout a dozen two-inch biscuits. They are barely sweet -- two tablespoons of sugar in the whole batch -- and suit splitting and buttering, or eating with jam or a sweetened chocolate sauce.
This comes from one of the recipe booklets Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, distributed to promote its chocolate and cocoa, a genre that flourished from the 1880s into the 1920s as manufacturers discovered that the surest way to sell a tin was to hand out uses for it. The company's Breakfast Cocoa was pressed to remove part of the cocoa butter -- though as a "breakfast" cocoa it still ran comparatively rich -- and was advertised as costing very little per cup, and booklets like this one pushed it well past the drinking cup into cakes, puddings, sauces and, here, an ordinary tea biscuit. Baker's booklets did credit recipes to well-known cookery writers, among them Maria Parloa, who wrote for the company directly, and Fannie Merritt Farmer, and the style of the instructions -- level measurements throughout, dry ingredients sifted together -- is consistent with the Boston Cooking School's emphasis on standardised measuring, still a relatively new discipline in American home cookery.