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Light Foam Biscuits
1 quart Five Roses flour 1 tablespoon baking powder 1 tablespoon lard 1 tablespoon butter 1 cup (coffee cup) sweet milk 1 egg (beaten separately and mixed with milk) Mix as usual, cut and bake 20 minutes in quick oven.
A terse turn-of-the-century biscuit formula that assumes the cook already knows the method. The liquid is the part that needs judgment.
- A quart of flourFlour was measured by volume in a dry quart measure: about 4 cups, roughly 1 lb once sifted. Weigh it if you can, since scooping packed flour will push this dough well past what one cup of milk can wet.
- The liquid is shortOne cup of milk plus one egg to four cups of flour will not come together as biscuit dough by modern standards; expect to add another 1/2 to 3/4 cup of milk to reach a soft, slightly sticky mass. Older cups and quarts varied enough that the original ratio may simply reflect a larger "coffee cup."
- Coffee cupMany old recipes treat a teacup as smaller than a coffee cup, the teacup often reckoned at about 3/4 cup and the coffee cup at a full cup or a little more, though equivalents varied. Treat it as 1 cup and adjust with the note above.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh milk, as opposed to sour or buttermilk. Whole milk is the closest match; with no acid in the liquid, baking powder rather than soda is what would work here.
- LeaveningOne tablespoon is 3 teaspoons for 4 cups of flour, slightly under the modern rule of about 1 teaspoon per cup. A fourth teaspoon, plus 1/2 teaspoon salt, which the recipe omits entirely, gives a better result.
- "Mix as usual"Sift the flour with the baking powder, rub or cut in the cold lard and butter until it disappears into crumbs, then stir in the beaten egg and milk with as few strokes as will bind it. Overworking a hard-wheat flour like this one gives tough, bready biscuits.
- Quick oven, shorter bakeA quick oven is usually reckoned at roughly 400-450F. Twenty minutes at that heat will likely overbake a standard half-inch biscuit; check at 12 minutes and expect 12-15 total unless you cut them thick.
- LardStill available and still the best shortening for flakiness here. Vegetable shortening substitutes one for one; using all butter makes a richer, slightly less tender biscuit.
- YieldAbout 16 to 18 biscuits from a 2-inch cutter. Serve straight from the oven, as the recipe's original readers would have.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, with offices in Montreal and Winnipeg, and like most miller's cookbooks it existed to sell flour, in this case a hard Canadian spring wheat prized for its strength. That accounts for the brevity: the compilers gathered recipes contributed by Canadian housewives and printed them nearly as received, on the assumption that a woman baking daily bread needed no instruction in cutting fat into flour. The name "light foam" is unexplained in the book itself, though it may point to the separately beaten egg.