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Sweet Cream Biscuits (Eggless)
4 cups Five Roses flour 1 cup sweet cream 1 cup skimmed milk 2 teaspoons cream of tartar 1 teaspoon soda 1 teaspoon salt.
It is important to pay careful attention to the measurement of the materials. The cupfuls of cream and milk should be scant, but the cream should be rich. The cups of flour (measured before sifting) should be level. The teaspoons of cream of tartar and soda should be slightly rounded. The salt level. Moreover, the cups used should be the standard half-pint measure rather than the teacup or coffee cup.
Sift the salt, soda and cream of tartar with flour, and after putting the cream and milk together mix the ingredients just mentioned. Handle as quickly and as little as possible. Roll out without using any extra flour except a bare sprinkling on the board. Cut the biscuits ½ inch thick, put in warm pans and bake in a rather quick oven with a good bottom heat.
The biscuits should rise to three times their original thickness before browning, and ought to be done in 20 minutes. The dough should be as soft as it is possible to handle even slightly sticky. Success will depend mainly upon this and proper baking. Properly made, the biscuits will be as light as a feather.
A quick bread leavened with the old cream-of-tartar-and-soda pairing rather than tinned baking powder. The recipe's own emphasis is right: the dough must stay slack and slightly sticky, and everything else follows from that.
- The hinge: a soft doughThe instruction to keep the dough "as soft as it is possible to handle" is the whole recipe. Resist adding flour at the board; a tacky dough steams internally and gives the threefold rise described. A dry, tidy dough will produce hard, squat biscuits no matter how good the oven.
- Sweet cream"Sweet" means fresh and unsoured, as opposed to soured or cultured cream, also common in farm kitchens. Use whipping or heavy cream, around 35% fat, for the "rich" cream the recipe asks for.
- Skimmed milkModern skim milk is a reasonable stand-in for the original. One scant cup of heavy cream with one scant cup of skim gives a mixture richer than half-and-half, nearer light cream; whole milk plus cream can also be used.
- Cup measureThe book's "standard half-pint measure" is the same 8 fl oz as the modern cup, so no conversion is needed. "Scant" means just under the line; the flour is measured level and before sifting, which will give somewhere in the region of 4 1/2 to 5 oz per cup depending on how the cup is filled.
- Cream of tartar and sodaTogether these are a homemade single-acting baking powder that begins working the moment the liquid goes in. Mix, roll, cut and get the pans into the oven without delay, since there is no second lift from heat as with modern double-acting powder. Two slightly rounded teaspoons cream of tartar to one of soda is the correct ratio.
- A rather quick ovenProbably somewhere around 425F. "Good bottom heat" means strong heat from below; a preheated baking sheet or a stone on the lower rack approximates it. Warm the pans as directed rather than using them cold.
- Thickness and yieldCut at 1/2 inch, not thicker, so the biscuits triple to about 1 1/2 inches. The recipe gives no yield.
- The flourFive Roses was a hard Canadian spring wheat flour, stronger than most all-purpose flour sold today. Modern bread flour is closer, though all-purpose works if you accept a slightly softer crumb; either way judge by feel and hold back a little liquid only if the dough will not come off your hands at all.
- TimingTwenty minutes at that heat is generous for half-inch biscuits. Start checking at 12 to 14 minutes and pull them when the tops are just golden.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and was widely distributed in Canada, sold cheaply or given away with flour and built almost entirely from recipes submitted by women who baked with the brand. That explains the tone of this entry: it reads less like a formula than like a practised baker explaining, at some length, why other people's biscuits fail. The eggless note in the title is worth attention. Eggs were seasonal and had cash value, and a biscuit that needed none was a everyday biscuit rather than a company one. The cream of tartar and soda are the older leavening system, generally traced to the mid-nineteenth century, in which the cook combined the acid and the alkali herself; commercial baking powders had largely replaced it by the time this book appeared.