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Orange Biscuits
Sift together 2 cups bread flour 5 teaspoons baking powder and 1 teaspoon salt. With tips of fingers rub in 2 tablespoons shortening. Twenty minutes before the meal is to be served add 7/8 cup milk, mixing with a knife. Roll out 3/4 inch thick and cut with round cutter 1 inch in diameter. Place close together on a greased tin sheet. Break 16 lumps demi-tasse loaf sugar in halves and squeeze the Juice of 1/2 orange. Dip pieces of sugar one at a time in the orange juice and push a piece down in the center of each biscuit. Grate Orange rind over the biscuits and bake 15 minutes in a hot oven or at 450 degrees F.
A fast baking-powder biscuit dressed up with a sugar cube soaked in orange juice, meant to be mixed at the last minute and carried to the table hot. Two things in the original need attention before you start: the leavening is heavy by current standards, and "demi-tasse loaf sugar" no longer exists under that name.
- Mix late, bake immediatelyThe instruction to add the milk twenty minutes before serving is the hinge of the recipe. Baking powder begins working on contact with liquid, and these biscuits are built to go from bowl to oven to table without a pause.
- Demi-tasse loaf sugarLoaf sugar was cut into lumps for the table, and demi-tasse lumps were the smaller ones served with after-dinner coffee; they were smaller than a modern standard cube, though no exact size was fixed. Breaking sixteen in half gives thirty-two pieces, so use small cubes halved, and halve them again if yours are large.
- Baking powderFive teaspoons to two cups of flour is more than a modern biscuit uses; most current recipes call for 3 to 4 teaspoons. With current powder, 3 teaspoons will lift these adequately and avoid the soapy, metallic edge that too much leavening leaves.
- Bread flourEarly-century "bread flour" meant flour milled from hard wheat, as distinguished from soft pastry flour; it is not necessarily the same thing as today's high-protein specialty flour. All-purpose gives a more tender crumb here; if you use bread flour, mix and roll with a light hand.
- 7/8 cup milkThat is 3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons. Add it in two goes — flour absorbency varies and you want a soft dough that just holds together, not a wet one.
- OvenThe recipe supplies its own number, 450F, which is what a "hot oven" meant. Fifteen minutes is right for biscuits this small; check at twelve.
- Cutter size and yieldA 1-inch cutter on 3/4-inch dough gives small, tall biscuits. The recipe gives no yield, though the thirty-two sugar halves suggest the author expected somewhere near that number. Set close together so the sides stay soft and they climb rather than spread.
- The orangeHalf an orange yields enough juice to dip the cubes but the flavour is mostly in the rind grated over the tops. Zest before you juice, and use the whole fruit's rind rather than half.
Biscuits like these belong to the era when chemical leavening had made hot bread a matter of twenty minutes rather than a morning's work, and American cookbooks filled their luncheon and supper menus with things that could be finished while the guests were already in the house. The sugar-cube trick is a frugal piece of theatre: a lump of sugar soaked in citrus juice and pressed into the dough melts into a small glazed well at the centre of each biscuit — a way of getting a filled, sweetened roll without making a filling.