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Light Biscuit
Two quarts flour, one large tablespoonful lard, and the same of butter. Salt to the taste. One teaspoonful soda and enough buttermilk to make a soft dough. Bake quickly.--Mrs. Dr. S.
A soda biscuit scaled for a large household, written in the shorthand of a cook who had made it a thousand times. The proportions are lean by modern standards and the quantities want halving unless you are feeding a crowd.
- Two quarts of flourFlour was measured by volume, not weight: two quarts is 8 cups, roughly 2 lb of soft Southern flour. Halve or quarter the recipe for a household batch; a full mixing yields something like three dozen two-inch biscuits.
- Very little fatOne large tablespoon each of lard and butter for 8 cups of flour is only about an ounce of fat, a little more if the spoons were heaped, a fraction of what a modern biscuit carries. The result is a soft, bready, faintly chewy biscuit rather than a flaky one. Cooks who want the familiar tender crumb add considerably more.
- The soda is underscaledOne teaspoon of soda for 8 cups of flour is about half the modern rule of a quarter-teaspoon per cup. Period soda was coarser, and buttermilk acidity varied; as written, the rise will be modest. This is the hinge of the recipe, and it is worth judging by the batch rather than the line.
- Buttermilk"Enough to make a soft dough" is roughly 3 cups for the full quantity, added gradually. Cultured supermarket buttermilk is not the same thing as the churn byproduct assumed here, so the dough may want a little more or less.
- Bake quicklyThe recipe asks only that it be baked quickly; a hot oven, somewhere around 425-450F, answers. Biscuits need the high heat to set the crust before the gas escapes; 10 to 12 minutes on an upper rack.
- HandlingCut the fat in cold, mix only until the dough coheres, and pat rather than roll. Soft dough plus minimal fat means overworking shows up immediately as toughness.
In Virginia cookbooks of this period "light biscuit" often seems to work as a term of contrast as much as description: it marks the quick, soda-raised or yeast-raised biscuit against the beaten biscuit, that hard, blistered, unleavened round that was pounded with a mallet or run through a brake for half an hour. A light biscuit could be mixed and baked quickly, which is why versions of it crowd the bread chapters of books like this one. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) was assembled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia housekeepers, and the terse attribution here to "Mrs. Dr. S." is typical of the format: the recipe assumes the reader already knows what a soft dough feels like and what a quick oven does, and supplies only the proportions she would otherwise have to remember.