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Baking Powder Biscuits
2 cups Five Roses flour 4 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon salt 1 cup milk and water (half of each) 1 tablespoon butter 1 tablespoon lard.
Note-Currants may be added to taste.
Sift the flour, salt and baking powder twice together. Cream butter and lard and add to dry ingredients, using the tips of your fingers. Then add the liquid, mixing with a knife until you have a very soft dough. Place on your mixing board but do not knead. Roll out lightly until ¾ inch thick. Cut out and bake in a hot oven for 15 minutes.
A straightforward soft-dough biscuit from a Canadian milling company's promotional book. Two details carry the recipe: the dough must stay slack, and the oven must be genuinely hot.
- Oven temperature"A hot oven" in this period means 425-450F. Fifteen minutes at 450F suits a ¾-inch biscuit; at 425F allow closer to 15-18 minutes, until the tops are browned and the sides feel dry.
- Baking powder quantityFour teaspoons to two cups of flour is high by current standards, where 2-3 teaspoons is usual. Early twentieth-century baking powders varied in strength and lost potency in the tin; with a fresh modern double-acting powder you may taste a faint metallic edge at the full amount.
- Five Roses flourA hard-wheat Canadian all-purpose flour, higher in protein than most American all-purpose brands. Ordinary all-purpose flour works; the biscuits will be a little more tender and slightly less lofty.
- Lard and butterBoth are still available, and the mix gives flakiness from the lard with flavour from the butter. Use them cold rather than creamed soft if you want distinct flaky layers; the original's creaming produces a more cake-like, uniform crumb.
- Milk and waterHalf and half was probably a matter of economy, though a proportion of water also gives a slightly lighter result. Whole milk alone works and browns better; the dough should be wet enough to be barely handleable.
- Do not kneadThe instruction is deliberate and worth obeying. Mix with a knife only until the flour disappears, pat or roll once, and cut straight down without twisting the cutter.
- CurrantsIf adding them, toss them into the dry ingredients before the liquid so they do not clump, and expect them to darken on the biscuit bottoms.
- YieldAbout ten to twelve biscuits from a 2-inch cutter. Best within an hour of baking; they stale quickly.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Winnipeg and Montreal, and like the Gold Medal books it existed to sell flour: recipes were solicited from home cooks across Canada and printed under the brand's name. Baking powder biscuits belong to the long shift away from yeast and from saleratus soured with buttermilk; commercial baking powders became reliable and cheap in the later nineteenth century, and a quick bread that could go from bowl to table in under half an hour suited a kitchen under constant demand. The suggestion to add currants shows how thin the line was between a biscuit and a tea cake in these books, where the same dough answered for supper bread or something sweeter with jam.