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Marmalade Biscuits
Sift together 2 cups bread flour 5 teaspoons baking powder and 1 teaspoon salt. With tips of fingers work in 2 tablespoons shortening. Add 7/8 cup milk, stirring with a knife. Toss on a floured cloth or board and roll out 1/4 inch thick. Cut in oval shapes 6 inches long and 3 inches wide with round ends. Lay on tin sheet. Make 1/2-inch cuts 1 inch from and parallel with the ends. Put 1 teaspoon of orange marmalade in the center. Bring one end of dough through hole in other end. Press edges together and bake in hot oven or at 450 degrees F. for 15 minutes. Pastry may be used instead of baking powder biscuit dough for these turnovers.
A plain baking-powder dough given a party shape: slits cut near each end and one end drawn back through, so the biscuit ties itself around a spoonful of marmalade. Most of what needs translating here is the leavening and the handling.
- The baking powder is highFive teaspoons to two cups of flour is half again to twice what a modern cook would use. Period powders may have varied in strength; 1 tablespoon is ample, and more than that can leave a soapy, metallic edge.
- 7/8 cup milkThree-quarters cup plus two tablespoons. Add it gradually rather than all at once — flours vary, and the dough should be soft enough to roll but not sticky.
- Bread flourIn period American usage this meant hard-wheat flour for bread, as against pastry flour. All-purpose is the closest ordinary modern substitute and gives a more tender biscuit.
- ShorteningMost likely lard or a vegetable shortening, though the recipe says only "shortening". Butter works and tastes better, but keep it cold and work it in only to a coarse crumb — the fat should stay in flakes.
- Oven and timeThe recipe names its own temperature, 450F; period tables put "hot oven" somewhere in the 400–450F range. Fifteen minutes is the outer limit for quarter-inch dough; start checking at ten, and pull them when the tops are gold and the undersides set.
- The shapingRoll a true quarter inch, no thicker, or the knot will not pull through cleanly. Cut the two half-inch slits an inch in from each rounded end, set the marmalade in the middle, then feed one end up through the opposite slit and press the join. A generous teaspoon is the maximum — more will boil out and weld the biscuit to the pan.
- Pan and leakage"tin sheet" is simply a tin baking sheet; the recipe says nothing about greasing it. Parchment is worth using, since escaping marmalade burns hard and fast at 450F.
- YieldSix-inch by three-inch ovals from two cups of flour rolled thin gives roughly six to eight biscuits. Serve warm — the marmalade filling turns claggy once cold.
For Luncheon and Supper Guests belongs to the 1920s vogue for menu books aimed at the hostess rather than the cook, and this biscuit is a good example of what that vogue asked for: nothing costly, nothing difficult, but a shape that reads as deliberate on the plate. The dough is the standard American baking-powder biscuit that had displaced yeast rolls for quick baking through the nineteenth century, here folded into a knot around orange marmalade — a preserve often said to have reached American pantries largely as an imported Scottish and English product before domestic makers took it up, and which by this period carried, at least to my reading, a faint air of the breakfast table gone slightly formal. The closing line, that pastry may be substituted, is the tell: the author cares more about the turnover shape and the marmalade than about which dough carries them, because the point of the dish is that it looks composed when it comes to the luncheon table.