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Butterscotch Biscuits
Sift together 2 cups bread flour 5 teaspoons baking powder and 1/2 1/2 teaspoon salt. Work in with tips of fingers 2 tablespoons shortening, add 7/8 cup milk, stirring with a knife. Roll thin, spread with 1/3 cup butter, creamed and mixed with 3/4 cup brown sugar. Roll up like a jelly roll, cut off pieces 1 inch thick, put in greased muffin pans cut side up, and bake 15 minutes at 400 degrees F. This makes 16 biscuits.
A baking-powder biscuit dough rolled up with a brown-sugar butter filling and baked in muffin cups — essentially a quick sticky bun. The original is unusually complete for its period, giving both a temperature and a yield, so most of the work here is translating measures and habits.
- The filling wants to escapeCream the butter and brown sugar to a spreadable paste rather than leaving it loose, and leave a clean half-inch margin at the far edge before rolling. Any filling pressed to the very edge runs out into the pan and welds the biscuits in place.
- Grease well, or lineBrown sugar and butter caramelise and set hard as the pans cool. Butter the cups generously and turn the biscuits out within a minute or two of leaving the oven; paper liners also work and are the simpler insurance.
- Bread flour is deliberateBread flour — In period usage 'bread flour' usually meant ordinary white flour as distinct from pastry flour, so no special intent should be read into it. All-purpose works and gives a tenderer biscuit; if you use it, you may want the milk back nearer 3/4 cup, since it absorbs less.
- 7/8 cup milkThat is 3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons, a little under 210 ml. Add most of it, then the rest only as needed — the dough should be soft and shaggy, not sticky.
- Baking powderFive teaspoons to two cups of flour is heavy by modern standards; one common explanation is that period baking powders were less reliably strong by the time they were used, though that cannot be verified here. With fresh powder, 4 teaspoons is plenty and avoids the faint metallic edge a big dose can leave.
- "Roll thin"About 1/4 inch. Roll the sheet so that the side you roll up along is about 16 inches, which is what the recipe's yield of sixteen 1-inch slices requires. Thinner gives more turns of filling; much thicker and the centre of each slice stays doughy in 15 minutes.
- Oven and doneness400F is right as written, and 15 minutes is realistic for 1-inch slices. Look for browned tops and filling bubbling at the edges of the cups.
- Yield and servingSixteen biscuits, filling a standard 12-cup tin plus four more. Best within an hour of baking, while the caramel is still soft.
"Butterscotch" here means nothing more than brown sugar cooked with butter — the flavour pairing, not a candy, and American cookbooks of the 1910s and 1920s attached the word freely to pies, sauces, cookies and rolls of this kind. The recipe belongs to a family of quick-bread sticky buns: all the effect of a cinnamon-roll breakfast in under half an hour, with no rising time. The instruction to "roll up like a jelly roll" is a period shorthand that suggests the jelly-roll cake was familiar enough that the author could rely on it as a description of a technique rather than having to teach it.