Home › Biscuits › Prepared Flour for Biscuits
Prepared Flour for Biscuits
Have the flour prepared in bulk as follows: To 16 lbs. of Five Roses flour, add 1/4 lb. soda and 1/2 lb. cream of tartar and mix. Sift all together twice and put in an air-tight box.
This is a bulk homemade self-raising flour: baking soda and cream of tartar sifted through a full sack of flour so that biscuit-making needs only fat and liquid. The proportions are sound, but a few things about it behave differently in a modern kitchen.
- The ratio, scaled downThe book's proportion is 1 part soda to 2 parts cream of tartar by weight, which is the classic pre-packaged-baking-powder formula. For 4 cups (1 lb) of flour that works out to roughly 1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda and 4 1/2 teaspoons cream of tartar, or about 3/8 teaspoon soda plus a scant 1 1/4 teaspoons cream of tartar per cup.
- Leavening strengthThat gives roughly the lift of 1 1/2 teaspoons of commercial baking powder per cup of flour, about the same nominal strength as modern self-raising flour, though the tartrate reaction is much faster than a modern double-acting powder. Expect a fast rise and a faintly tart edge from the cream of tartar.
- It is single-actingSoda and cream of tartar react as soon as they meet liquid, with little or no second lift in the oven. Mix the dough quickly, cut the biscuits, and get them into a hot oven at once; dough left standing will rise poorly.
- No cornstarch, so no bufferCommercial baking powder contains cornstarch to absorb moisture and keep the acid and base apart; here the flour itself is the only diluent. Damp storage will set the reaction off slowly and the flour will go dead, which is presumably part of the reason for the air-tight box.
- How long it keepsSixteen pounds was a reasonable quantity for a household baking daily; it is not for most cooks now. Mix a few pounds at a time and use it within two or three months, storing it cool and sealed.
- Salt is not includedUnlike modern self-raising flour, this carries no salt. Keep whatever salt the biscuit recipe calls for.
- Sifting twice is not optionalWith this much dry chemical going into this much flour, uneven distribution means soapy, yellow-spotted patches in some biscuits and no rise in others. Sift twice as written, or three times if the batch is large.
- Five Roses flourA hard Canadian spring wheat flour, probably higher in protein than most all-purpose flour sold today. Modern all-purpose works fine here and will give a more tender biscuit.
Cream of tartar and baking soda were a standard chemical leavening of the nineteenth-century kitchen, sold as two jars rather than one tin, and mixing them into flour in bulk did the measuring once instead of every morning. Commercial baking powders had been on the market for decades by the time the Five Roses book appeared, and were variable in strength and the subject of long-running public argument about alum. The book itself was produced by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to sell its flour and was distributed in very large numbers to Canadian households in the early twentieth century; a formula given in sixteen-pound lots implies a household buying flour in quantity and baking often.