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Baking Powder Biscuit
One quart of flour One teaspoon of Larkin Table Salt Four tablespoons of butter or lard Six teaspoons of Larkin Baking Powder Sift the baking powder, flour and salt into a bowl, and add the shortening, cutting it through and through until well blended.
A house-brand biscuit formula, and as printed it stops short: the flour is cut with fat and then the text ends, with no liquid, no shaping and no oven. What follows fills the gaps in a way consistent with biscuit practice of the period.
- A quart of flourFlour was commonly measured by volume, and a kitchen quart is four cups, roughly 1 lb 2 oz of modern all-purpose flour. Sift it as directed; period flour was less uniform and the sifting also distributes the baking powder.
- The missing liquidNo liquid is given, which makes the recipe unusable as it stands. Biscuit dough of this size takes about 1 1/2 cups of milk or buttermilk, added all at once and stirred only until the flour is damp.
- The missing ovenBaking powder biscuits want a hot oven, 450F, for 10 to 12 minutes. A slower oven lets the gas escape before the crumb sets and gives flat, tough biscuits.
- Six teaspoons of baking powderThat is 1 1/2 teaspoons per cup of flour, at the generous end of modern practice, which runs from about 1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons per cup. Early powders were often single-acting and could lose strength on the shelf, which may account for the heavier hand. With fresh double-acting powder you can reduce to 4 or 5 teaspoons if you find the flavour metallic.
- Larkin salt and baking powderBoth are the publisher's own grocery lines, not distinct ingredients. Use ordinary table salt and any commercial baking powder; if yours is aluminum-free and single-acting, get the pans into the oven promptly.
- Cutting in the shorteningFour tablespoons for a quart of flour is a lean biscuit by modern taste, closer to a soda bread than to a rich Southern biscuit. Keep the butter or lard cold and stop when the largest pieces are the size of peas; the visible flakes of solid fat are what lift the layers.
- Handling and yieldKnead briefly, no more than a dozen strokes, pat to about 3/4 inch and cut straight down without twisting. Expect roughly 16 to 18 two-inch biscuits.
Chemical leavening turned biscuits from a laborious beaten or yeast-raised bread into a quick everyday one, and by the late nineteenth century commercial baking powder was among the most aggressively marketed goods in the American grocery trade. The branded ingredients here are the clue to the book's purpose: the Larkin Company of Buffalo built its business selling soap and groceries direct to households through clubs and premium schemes, and cookbooks like this were promotional literature as much as instruction, written to keep the company's own products in front of the cook. That also explains the recipe's brevity. A cook of the period needed no reminder of how much milk a quart of flour would take, or that biscuits go into a hot oven, so the text spends its words on the two things being advertised.