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Excellent Light Biscuit
Boil four large Irish potatoes. While hot, mash them with a piece of lard the size of an egg. Add one teacup of milk and one of yeast. Stir in enough flour to make a good batter and set it to rise. It will take about two quarts of flour. When light, make up the dough. You generally have to add more water or milk. Roll thick, let them rise slowly, but bake them quickly.--Mrs. M. G. H.
This is a yeast-raised potato roll rather than a chemically leavened biscuit in the modern American sense. The instructions assume a cook with a crock of live liquid yeast on the shelf, so that is the first thing to translate.
- "Yeast" means a liquid starterOne teacup of yeast is a cup of homemade liquid barm or potato yeast, not a packet. A cup of active sourdough starter at 100% hydration is the closest working equivalent; otherwise use a scant tablespoon of instant yeast and replace the missing liquid with milk.
- TeacupNineteenth-century American receipts used the teacup as an informal measure, usually reckoned somewhere between a half and three-quarters of a modern cup rather than a full 8-ounce measuring cup. Where the batter is concerned the exact figure matters little, since flour is added to consistency.
- Irish potatoesOrdinary white potatoes, named to distinguish them from sweet potatoes, which were common enough in Virginia that the qualifier was worth making. Four large ones is about 1 1/2 to 2 lb; mash them while genuinely hot so the lard melts in.
- Lard the size of an eggAbout 2 oz, or 1/4 cup. Butter or shortening works, though lard gives the tender, slightly savory crumb the recipe is after.
- Two quarts of flourMeasured by volume, roughly 8 cups, or about 2 lb. Treat it as a ceiling rather than a target and stop when the dough is soft and just manageable, since potato dough absorbs unpredictably.
- Bake them quicklyThe recipe asks only for quick baking rather than naming an oven; a hot oven, in the region of 425-450F, answers the direction. High heat is what gives the thick-rolled rounds their spring; a moderate oven will dry them out before they lift.
- Rise slowly, bake quicklyThe hinge of the recipe. The shaped biscuits want a long, cool final proof -- an hour or more at room temperature, until visibly puffed and slack -- then straight into a hot oven. Rushing the proof in a warm spot gives a coarse, bready crumb.
- Rolling thickness'Thick' is not specified; something around 3/4 inch is a reasonable reading, cut into rounds of about 2 inches. Rolled thin, they will have little to rise into after the second proof.
- YieldThe full quantity makes roughly three to four dozen biscuits, which suits a Virginia breakfast table and halves without trouble.
Potato-risen breads were a standing feature of Southern household cookery before commercial yeast was reliable or cheap. Boiled potato gave a homemade barm something to feed on, and the starch it contributed kept the finished bread moist longer than a plain flour dough -- a real advantage where baking happened on set days rather than on demand. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, gathered contributions from some 250 Virginia housekeepers, which is why so many of its receipts, this one included, close with initials rather than a name. The vagueness is characteristic of the genre: the contributor assumed her reader kept yeast going, knew what a good batter looked like, and could judge the heat of an oven for herself. What is called a biscuit here would be recognized today as a soft dinner roll; the sharp modern distinction between yeast rolls and baking-powder biscuits had not yet hardened when the book went to press.