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Crushed Wheat Biscuits
3 cups crushed wheat flour 2 cups Five Roses flour 1 cup sugar 1 large tablespoon shortening 1 teaspoon soda 2 teaspoons baking powder Pinch of salt 1 quart buttermilk. (Instead of shortening and buttermilk, might use 1 quart cream.)
An ingredient list with no method, in the style of the contributed recipes that fill the Five Roses book — the assumption was that any cook knew how a biscuit dough was mixed and baked. What follows fills in the gaps and flags the one proportion that will surprise you.
- Add the liquid graduallyA full quart of buttermilk to five cups of flour is far more liquid than a rolled biscuit dough can absorb; poured in all at once it gives a batter. Work it in by degrees and stop when the dough is soft but handleable, or accept the wetter mix and drop it in spoonfuls onto the sheet.
- Crushed wheat flourCoarsely cracked or kibbled wheat, sold today as cracked wheat or coarse whole wheat meal. It absorbs liquid slowly, so letting the mixed dough stand ten minutes before shaping saves you from adding flour you do not need.
- Five Roses flourThe Lake of the Woods Milling Company's household white flour, a hard-wheat all-purpose. Ordinary all-purpose flour substitutes directly.
- The quartCanadian cookbooks of this period generally worked in imperial measure, in which a quart is 40 imperial fluid ounces, about 1.1 litres or a little under five US cups rather than the 4-cup US quart. The book's usage is not always consistent, but either way the mixture is very wet.
- Shortening"Shortening" at this date usually meant lard or a vegetable compound; butter works and tastes better. One large tablespoon is perhaps 15-20 g -- a very lean biscuit, which may be why the cream variant is offered as an alternative to both fat and buttermilk.
- Soda and baking powder togetherThe soda is there to neutralise the buttermilk's acid, the baking powder to guarantee lift. If you use the sweet-cream variant instead, drop the soda: with no acid it leaves a soapy, faintly metallic taste.
- OvenBiscuits of this kind want a hot oven, 425–450°F, for 12 to 15 minutes, until the tops are browned and the bottoms sound hollow. A cooler oven dries the cracked wheat before the crumb sets.
- Sweetness and yieldA cup of sugar makes these closer to a sweet tea biscuit or scone than a supper biscuit; halve it if you want them served with butter and meat. The batch is large — expect three to four dozen.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company as advertising for its flour, and much of its content came in from Canadian housewives who used the brand, which explains the telegraphic style here: a list of what goes in, and the confident assumption that the reader already knows what to do with it. Cracked or "crushed" wheat had a following in the early twentieth century among cooks who wanted the bran and germ that roller-milled white flour removed, and it was usually blended with white flour rather than used alone, since coarse wheat meal on its own gives a heavy, crumbling biscuit. The quart of buttermilk points to a household that still churned its own butter, or bought from someone who did — buttermilk was then a by-product to be used up rather than a cultured product bought by the pint, and recipes of this vintage treat it as something you had in quantity.