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Light Cream Biscuits
4 cups Five Roses flour 2 eggs 1 cup sweet cream 2 teaspoons baking powder Pinch of salt.
Note. Ginger or other spice may be added to taste.
Beat eggs very light, and add to cream.
Mix in the flour and baking powder, and make soft dough. Roll out and cut with small cutter. Bake in quick oven.
A short, dry, cream-enriched dough of the kind that sits between a British tea biscuit and a North American quick-bread round. The proportions as printed are unusually stiff, and that is the thing to watch.
- The liquid is the hingeFour cups of flour against only one cup of cream and two eggs is dry for the "soft dough" the recipe calls for. Add cream a tablespoon at a time until the dough just coheres, and stop mixing the moment it holds.
- Sweet creamMeans fresh, unsoured cream, as distinct from sour cream or buttermilk. Whipping cream at about 35 percent fat is a reasonable modern stand-in for hand-skimmed household cream, which varied considerably in richness.
- Five Roses flourA hard spring-wheat all-purpose flour from the Canadian prairies, stronger than most soft American all-purpose. Ordinary unbleached all-purpose works; handle the dough lightly, since the strength that suited bread will toughen a biscuit.
- Quick ovenRoughly 400 to 450F. Small thin rounds want the higher end and will be done in 8 to 12 minutes, taking colour at the edges before the centres dry out.
- LeaveningTwo teaspoons of baking powder to four cups of flour is roughly a third to a half of modern practice. These will be close-grained rather than fluffy, but if you want more lift, three to four teaspoons is within reason for this quantity of flour.
- Small cutterAround 1 1/2 to 2 inches, rolled roughly 1/4 inch thick. Rolled thicker they behave like scones and need a few minutes longer.
- SpicingFor four cups of flour, one to two teaspoons of ground ginger, cinnamon or mixed spice. There is no sugar in the dough at all, so spice reads as aroma rather than sweetness unless you add two or three tablespoons of sugar with the flour.
- YieldAbout three to four dozen small biscuits. They keep several days in a tin and suit butter, cheese or tea.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and distributed in enormous numbers to Canadian households who bought Five Roses flour, which makes it less a chef's book than a collective record of what ordinary cooks were baking in the years around the First World War. Many of its recipes were submitted by customers, which explains the telegraphic instructions and the assumption that the reader already knows what a soft dough should feel like. The word "biscuit" is doing double duty here: with no sugar, no fat beyond the cream, and a small cutter, this looks closer to what is often described as the older British tea-biscuit tradition than to the buttery Southern American biscuit, though that reading is an interpretation rather than a documented lineage.