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Beaten Biscuit
One quart of flour, lard the size of a hen's egg, one teaspoonful of salt. Make into a moderately stiff dough with sweet milk. Beat for half an hour. Make out with the hand or cut with the biscuit cutter. Stick with a fork and bake in a hot oven, yet not sufficiently hot to blister the biscuit.--Mrs. S. T.
Another Recipe for Beaten Biscuit. 1 quart of flour. 1 teaspoonful of salt. 1 egg. 1 tablespoonful of butter and the same of lard.
Mix up these ingredients with skimmed milk, work them well together and beat fifteen minutes. Stick with a fork and bake quickly.--Mrs. E. B.
Two versions of the same thing: an unleavened biscuit raised only by the steam trapped in a dough that has been pounded until it blisters. The beating is not optional folklore, it is the entire method.
- The hinge: what beating doesPounding a very stiff, nearly dry dough develops gluten and works in air, which is the only lift these biscuits get. A food processor with the metal blade does the job in about 2 minutes, or a stand mixer with the dough hook in 10 to 12; the dough is ready when it turns satiny and blisters, and snaps back when pulled.
- A quart of flourMeasured by volume, roughly 4 to 4 1/2 cups, or about 1 lb. Soft Southern wheat flour is what these recipes assume; all-purpose works but gives a tougher biscuit.
- Lard the size of a hen's eggAbout 2 oz, or 1/4 cup. The second recipe's tablespoon each of butter and lard is a leaner dough, and it uses the egg for structure instead.
- Sweet milk, skimmed milk"Sweet" simply means fresh rather than soured or buttermilk. Skimmed milk was the cheap byproduct of butter-making; whole milk is fine, and you will need less than you expect, on the order of a cup or a little less, since the dough must stay stiff enough to resist the beating.
- A hot oven that will not blisterSomewhere in the region of 400 to 425F. Higher and the surface bubbles and browns before the inside sets. Bake roughly 15 to 20 minutes, until pale gold and firm.
- Sticking with a forkTwo or three pairs of holes through each round let steam escape so the biscuit stays flat and close-grained instead of splitting into a hollow shell.
- Rolling and cuttingRoll to about 1/3 in and cut small, 1 1/2 to 2 in across. Either quart of flour gives roughly two and a half to three dozen.
- What to expectNot a fluffy baking-powder biscuit. These are pale, dense, dry and crisp-edged, meant to be split by hand and eaten with country ham, butter or preserves, and they keep for days in a tin.
Beaten biscuit belongs to the Chesapeake and the upper South, where soft winter wheat and a shortage of reliable chemical leavening met an abundance of kitchen labor. Before saleratus and baking powder were cheap and dependable, mechanical work was the only way to lighten a wheat dough quickly, and the half hour of pounding Mrs. S. T. calls for was done on a marble slab or stump with the flat of an axe, a rolling pin or a mallet -- in many Virginia households, by enslaved cooks before emancipation and by hired Black cooks after it, a fact the book itself does not name. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions signed with initials, appeared in the period when the hand-cranked biscuit brake, a set of rollers that did the beating, was coming into use in Southern kitchens and beginning to make the labor merely tedious rather than punishing. The biscuit survived into the twentieth century mostly as a partner to salt-cured ham, its dry, close crumb being exactly what that ham wants.