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Cream Tea Biscuits (Makes 10 Biscuits)
1 cup thin sweet cream 2 cups Five Roses flour (or enough to roll) 1 teaspoon baking powder to each cup of flour.
Put the cream in mixing bowl, add flour with baking powder gradually so as not to get the dough too stiff. Roll to ½ 1/2 inch thick, cut, bake in oven not so hot as required for other biscuits.
A two-ingredient biscuit that works because the cream supplies both the liquid and the fat. The whole recipe hinges on not overworking the dough.
- "Thin sweet cream"Sweet means fresh rather than soured, and thin means light or table cream, roughly 18-20% fat. Modern half-and-half (10-12%) gives a drier biscuit; whipping cream makes them heavy and greasy. Light cream or a half-and-half/heavy cream blend is closest.
- Baking powderThe rule of a teaspoon per cup of flour means 2 teaspoons for the 2 cups given; measure them level. Note that the flour is open-ended ("or enough to roll"), so the ratio, not the fixed figure, is the instruction.
- SaltNone is called for. Add ½ teaspoon fine salt with the flour or the biscuits taste flat.
- The flourFive Roses was a hard-wheat Manitoba flour, stronger than most modern all-purpose. Start with 1¾ cups unbleached all-purpose and add more only until the dough just holds together; "enough to roll" is the real measure and too much flour is the usual failure.
- HandlingStir only until the flour disappears, then pat or roll once. Cream doughs toughen quickly because there is no solid fat to keep the gluten apart.
- Oven temperatureThe only guide is relative: cooler than for other biscuits. In a modern oven 400-425F is a reasonable reading. Bake about 12-15 minutes, until the tops are pale gold.
- Cutting and yieldTen biscuits from this quantity at ½ inch thick implies a fairly large cutter, on the order of 2½ to 3 inches. Press the cutter straight down without twisting, and set them close together on the sheet so they rise rather than spread.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Winnipeg and Montreal to promote its Five Roses brand of hard-wheat flour, and much of its content came from recipes submitted by Canadian housewives who used it. Cream biscuits belong to a family of quick breads that spread through North America after chemical leavening became cheap and reliable in the later nineteenth century, letting a cook make bread without waiting on yeast. The appeal of this particular version is economy of effort rather than economy of money: with cream on hand, there is no butter to cut in and nothing to rub, so the dough comes together in a bowl with a spoon.