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French Biscuit
1 quart of flour. 1 teaspoonful of salt.
Rub in one tablespoonful of butter and lard mixed.
Pour in half a teacup of yeast, two well beaten eggs, and enough water to make a soft dough. Knead half an hour. Then set to rise; when well risen, roll out, without kneading again. Handle lightly, first greasing the hands with butter. Cut with a biscuit cutter, greasing one biscuit and placing an other on it. Set to rise a second time before baking.--Mrs. S. T.
A yeast-raised roll rather than a baking-powder biscuit, and the recipe assumes a cook who already knows what a risen dough should look like. The original gives no oven temperature and no times, so those have to be supplied.
- The hinge: do not knead after the first riseThe dough is rolled out straight from the bowl, handled with buttered hands, and cut. That trapped gas is what makes these light; working it again turns them dense and bready.
- A quart of flourFlour was measured by volume: about 4 cups, roughly 1 lb / 450 g. Aim for a soft, slightly tacky dough and hold back some of the water until you see how the flour behaves.
- Half a teacup of yeastThis is homemade liquid yeast — a potato or hop ferment kept going in the pantry — not a dry packet. Half a teacup is about 1/3 cup of thin batter. Substitute roughly 2 teaspoons of instant yeast and add about 1/3 cup more water to compensate for the lost liquid.
- Knead half an hourLong hand-kneading times are common in recipes of this period, but the dough does not need that long today. Eight to ten minutes in a stand mixer, or twelve by hand, reaches the windowpane stage.
- Rising timesNone are given. Expect 1 to 1½ hours for the first rise at room temperature until doubled, and 30 to 45 minutes for the shaped, stacked biscuits until visibly puffed.
- Greasing and stackingButter the top of one round and set a second on it. The fat keeps the layers from fusing, so the baked roll splits cleanly in two at the table — the same principle as the buttered fold in a Parker House roll.
- OvenNo temperature or time is given at all. 400–425°F for 12 to 15 minutes, until the tops are pale gold.
- YieldAbout 18 to 20 doubled biscuits from a quart of flour, depending on cutter size. They are best the day they are made.
"Biscuit" in a nineteenth-century Virginia kitchen covered a wide range of small breads, from the beaten biscuit hammered on a stump to soft yeast rolls like this one; the word signalled size and shape more than leavening. The "French" here may point at the richness — butter, eggs, a fine soft crumb — rather than any particular French original; such labelling was common in American cookbooks of the period. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1879, gathered contributions from some two hundred and fifty Virginia housewives, which is why so many entries close with initials rather than a full name. The reliance on a half-teacup of liquid yeast fits its date: commercial compressed yeast was only beginning to reach American households in the 1870s, and many households still kept a living ferment on hand and fed it.