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Baking Powder Biscuits
1 qt. sifted Gold Medal flour 1 teaspoon salt 4 teaspoons baking powder 2 tablespoons butter 1 7/8 cups milk Sift the dry ingredients together four times; cut and rub the butter into the mixture with the thumb and fingers, add the milk gradually, mixing and cutting through with a knife until the whole is a light, spongy mass. Turn on a well floured board, roll lightly to one inch thick, cut with a biscuit cutter and bake in a hot oven from fifteen to twenty minutes. If two inch cutter is used the rule will make eighteen biscuits.
A plain, lean biscuit typical of turn-of-the-century flour-company pamphlets. Two things need translating: the volume measure of flour and the meaning of "a hot oven."
- A quart of flourMeasured after sifting, a quart is 4 cups, roughly 16 oz / 450-480 g of soft or all-purpose flour. Modern flour is milled finer and packs denser, so weigh it if you can rather than scooping.
- Hot oven425-450F. At 450F the biscuits will take closer to 12-15 minutes; the recipe's 15-20 minutes suits the lower end of that range and the full one-inch thickness.
- 1 7/8 cups milkThat is 1 3/4 cups plus 2 tablespoons. Hold back the last few tablespoons and add only what the flour takes — the dough should be soft and shaggy, not wet.
- Sifting four timesChiefly to aerate the flour, keep the volume measure consistent, and distribute the baking powder. Once through a sieve is enough now, but do sift rather than stir; even distribution of the leavener is the point.
- Only 2 tablespoons butterThis is a very lean biscuit by current standards, closer to a soft scone than to a flaky Southern biscuit. Rubbing it in with the fingers, as directed, is correct at this ratio; the fat is there for tenderness, not for layers.
- Baking powder strengthFour teaspoons to four cups is one teaspoon per cup, within the range of modern practice though lighter than many current biscuit recipes. Period baking powders were commonly single-acting tartrate or phosphate types that released much of their gas on wetting, so get the tray into the oven promptly once the milk goes in.
- Rolling and cuttingRoll lightly and press the cutter straight down without twisting; a twisted edge seals and the biscuit rises lopsided. Re-rolled scraps will be tougher, so cut close.
- YieldEighteen biscuits from a 2-inch cutter, as stated. They are best within an hour of baking.
Gold Medal's cook books were promotional literature from the Washburn-Crosby milling company of Minneapolis, forerunner of General Mills, and they exist to demonstrate what their flour could do in an ordinary kitchen. Baking powder biscuits were among the fastest breads in the American repertoire: no yeast, no rising time, no judgment about sponge or dough, and on the table in half an hour. Chemical leavening had moved from novelty to staple across the nineteenth century, first as saleratus and soda paired with sour milk, then as commercial baking powders that put the acid and the alkali in one tin, and by 1900 the "quick bread" was a fixture of the daily table. The measurement by the quart rather than the pound is a mark of the period as well; American home cooks measured by volume long after professional bakers weighed, and flour companies obliged them.