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B. F. Biscuits
1½ cups Five Roses flour 1½ cups breakfast food 3 teaspoons (heaping) baking powder 1½ tablespoons lard or butter 1 teaspoon (scant) salt.
Sift the flour, cereal, baking powder and salt together thoroughly. Rub in the shortening and add enough cold water to make a dough, just stiff enough to roll and cut into biscuits. Bake in a good hot oven. are These delicious eaten hot for breakfast, lunch or tea.
A plain baking-powder biscuit stretched with whatever cereal was already in the house. It works, but the original leaves two things unsaid: what "breakfast food" is, and how hot "a good hot oven" runs.
- "Breakfast food"In a Canadian kitchen of this era this meant a dry granular or flaked cereal sold for porridge — rolled oats, wheat flakes, or a farina-type product such as Cream of Wheat. Use it uncooked and dry, straight from the box; cooked leftover porridge will not measure or hydrate the same way.
- Choose a fine cereal for a tender biscuitRolled oats give a coarse, chewy crumb and absorb water slowly. If you want something closest to a conventional biscuit, use a fine farina or finely ground oats, and let the mixed dough stand five minutes before rolling so the cereal takes up the water.
- Five Roses flourA hard-wheat Canadian bread flour, higher in protein than most American all-purpose. Ordinary all-purpose works; bread flour gives the sturdier result the book expects.
- Oven temperature"A good hot oven" is usually read today as somewhere around 425–450°F; the book itself gives no figures. Biscuits raised with baking powder alone need that kind of heat to set the crust before the leavening is spent; reckon on roughly 10 to 14 minutes on an ungreased sheet and judge by colour.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons is a tablespoon level, and rather more than that heaped — a lot by modern standards, but the cereal is dead weight that needs lifting. If your baking powder is single-acting, get the pans into the oven quickly.
- "Enough cold water"Expect about ¾ to 1 cup, depending on the cereal. Add it in stages; the dough should just hold together and still feel slightly shaggy, not smooth.
- Shortening1½ tablespoons is a lean amount, closer to a scone than a rich biscuit. Cut cold butter or lard in until it disappears into the dry mix — the recipe says "rub in," which means fingertips, worked fast.
- YieldAbout a dozen 2-inch biscuits. They stale quickly, as low-fat biscuits do, and are best eaten soon after baking — the original recommends them hot for breakfast, lunch or tea.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to sell its flour, and this recipe shows the other half of the early-twentieth-century breakfast table: packaged cereal, which by the 1900s had moved from a health-reform novelty to a staple in Canadian and American pantries. The title initials most likely stand for breakfast food, given the ingredient list. "Breakfast food" was an umbrella term covering any of the competing brands a cook might already have in the house. Stretching wheat flour with a cheaper cereal was thrift as much as flavour, a habit that intensified in the flour-conservation campaigns of the First World War.