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Egg Biscuits
Sift a pint and a half of flour, add a teaspoon of salt, a tablespoon of sugar, two beaten eggs, a tablespoon of lard and half a pint of sweet milk to which has been added a teaspoon of cream tartar and half a teaspoon of soda.
Work to a smooth dough, roll half an inch thick, cut out in large biscuits, rub over with sweet milk, lay on buttered tins and bake brown in a quick oven.- Eliza R. Parker.
A plain baking-powder biscuit enriched with egg, leavened with the older cream-of-tartar-and-soda pairing rather than commercial baking powder. Nothing here is difficult, but two of the measurements and the oven need translating.
- The leavening is the hingeA teaspoon of cream of tartar plus half a teaspoon of soda is essentially homemade baking powder, and it begins working the instant it meets the milk. Stirring it into the liquid, as written, means you must mix, roll, cut and get the pan into the oven briskly; the dough will not wait. Sifting the two powders in with the flour instead is the usual modern practice and loses nothing.
- A pint and a half of flourFlour was measured by volume in this period: 3 cups, sifted before measuring, which is roughly 12 to 13 oz by weight.
- Half a pint of sweet milkOne cup. "Sweet" simply distinguishes it from the soured or buttermilk that many recipes of the era called for.
- Quick oven425 to 450F. Biscuits this size need 12 to 15 minutes; pull them when the tops are properly browned rather than pale, since the sugar and egg encourage color.
- LardA single tablespoon for 3 cups of flour is very lean by modern biscuit standards; the two eggs supply much of the richness the fat would otherwise provide. Butter or shortening substitutes directly, and cut it into the dry flour rather than adding it as a lump.
- Buttered tinsA greased sheet pan. Set the rounds close together, nearly touching, if you want soft sides; spaced apart if you want them crisp all round.
- YieldAbout ten to twelve biscuits from a 3-inch cutter at half an inch thick. The recipe's own 'large biscuits' suggests something bigger than a modern dinner biscuit.
Egg biscuits sit in the chemically leavened family that reshaped American baking through the second half of the nineteenth century, when cream of tartar and bicarbonate of soda let a cook put hot bread on the table in half an hour instead of waiting on yeast. Packaged baking powder was on the market by the later decades of the century, yet recipes like this one still specify the two components separately. Alum-based baking powders were the subject of loud public argument in the 1880s and 1890s, though much of the contemporary language about them came from competing manufacturers. The attribution to Eliza R. Parker is consistent with the period's community-contributed cookbooks, in which recipes were printed under a subscriber's name.