Egg Biscuits
Sift together 2 cups bread flour, measured after sifting once 5 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon salt and 1 tablespoon sugar. Work in with fingers 2 tablespoons shortening. Add 1 egg yolk, slightly beaten, mixed with 2/3 cup milk, cutting it in with a knife. Toss on floured cloth or board and knead 5 minutes. Shape in any way suggested below. Bake 15 minutes at 400 degrees F. Brush with milk or melted butter just before removing from the oven. Biscuit Shapes Make in small round balls and bake in muffin pans. Bake 2 round balls in each muffin pan, brushing between with melted butter. Bake 3 round balls in each muffin pan. Roll 1/4 inch thick, spread with butter, roll up like a jelly roll, cut in pieces 1 inch thick, and bake in muffin pans. Prepare as above, sprinkling with sugar and cinnamon before rolling. Prepare as above, sprinkling with chopped nuts and maple sugar before rolling. Roll 1/4 inch thick, spread with butter, fold in 3 layers, cut off strips 1 inch wide, twist and coil. When baked spread with confectioners' frosting. Shape and roll in strips 8 inches long and about as large around as a lead pencil and bake. Roll 1/2 inch thick, cut with small oval cutter, brush with butter, double over and place close together and bake.
A straightforward baking-powder biscuit enriched with an egg yolk, written mainly as a base for the eight shapes listed at the end. Two details need adjusting for a modern kitchen.
- Do not knead five minutesFive minutes is a long knead for a biscuit dough, and with today's flour it develops enough gluten to make the biscuits tough and bready. Ten to twelve gentle folds, twenty seconds at most, is what this dough wants.
- Bread flour is optionalUse all-purpose. Modern bread flour runs about 12-13% protein and will only compound the toughness problem above.
- The baking powderFive teaspoons to two cups of flour is on the high side by current practice, which runs about 1 to 1.5 teaspoons per cup of flour. Four teaspoons of modern double-acting powder should give ample lift.
- ShorteningAny solid fat works: vegetable shortening, lard or cold butter. If you use butter, keep it cold and stop rubbing while pea-sized pieces remain, which gives flakier layers than fully worked-in fat.
- Measuring flour"measured after sifting once" matters. Sifted flour spooned into a cup weighs noticeably less than scooped flour; two sifted cups is roughly 7-8 oz / 200-225 g. Weigh it if you can.
- The final brushBrushing with milk or melted butter just before removing from the oven glosses the tops. Pull the pan, brush, return for a minute.
- YieldAbout a dozen biscuits from the plain rounds, fewer from the layered and rolled shapes. The recipe leaves one egg white over; hold it for the confectioners' frosting mentioned in the last shape, or for an egg wash on something else.
Egg biscuits sit at the point where the American baking-powder biscuit began borrowing from the sweet roll. Chemical leavening had made quick breads a fixture of the home kitchen from the mid-nineteenth century onward, and the interest here is less in plain bread than in variety of appearance: one dough, many shapes, a different look on the plate for each meal. The cloverleaf (three balls in a pan), the pencil-thin stick, the folded oval that opens like a pocketbook, and the twisted, coiled strip with frosting are all listed here without names, as if the reader would recognize them. The single egg yolk enriches the crumb and deepens the color enough to carry a sugar-and-cinnamon or maple-and-nut filling, putting the biscuit somewhere between bread and cake at a time when serving something in between was exactly the point.